Learning Over Lecture: How to Go Beyond Medical Content Writing and Facilitate Online Learning in the Healthcare Industry
Why guiding your audience through interactive experiences leads to better outcomes in CME/CE
Health professionals are notoriously short on time, which means designing CME/CE content that’s meaningful, interactive, and immersive is essential to keeping motivation high. This is especially true for online content where it is too easy for a learner’s attention to wander off to another screen.
One way CME/CE professionals can prevent losing their audience is by embracing the art of facilitation — a game changer in CME/CEHP (continuing medical education/continuing education for health professionals) that goes beyond content delivery and supports active learning with interaction, dialogue, and exploration.
Let’s briefly define what facilitation means in the CME/CE context and go over some tips you can implement next time you’re designing an online CME/CE workshop.
A special thank you Gwyn Wansbrough, a facilitator and course designer, who recently spoke to me about creating interactive learning experiences on an episode of the Write Medicine podcast. Her insights contributed to this article.
What Does a Facilitator Do?
Instead of taking on the role of an expert with all the answers and delivering a lecture, a facilitator acts as a guide in the learning process. The facilitator's job is to make it easy for a group to achieve an outcome, often by designing a process that helps the group reach a specific goal. The focus is on creating a safe and engaging environment that fosters connection, meaning, and purpose.
Many of the modern concepts behind facilitation come from Jack Mezirow, a sociologist at Columbia University, who was influenced by the adult learning theorist and pragmatist John Dewey. Mezirow subsequently initiated a transformative learning movement in the field of adult education.
In the CME/CE context, that means tuning into your audience's needs and designing interactive activities that blend seamlessly into the course content, allowing learners to explore the concepts they just discovered. Some examples include putting participants into virtual breakout rooms for discussion or adding in time for reflection exercises. In other words, being a good facilitator requires taking a step back and allowing learners to make their own conclusions about outcomes while providing guidance.
From Medical Content Writing to Adult Learning
CME is a niche part of medical content writing, and it's one of the only industries in which you'll be called upon to do more than write. As a CME medical writer, you may have the option to design, write, and teach content to physicians and other healthcare providers. This requires an in-depth understanding of the obstacles medical professionals face daily, insights into how adults(particularly healthcare providers)learn, and an ability to translate complex terminology and jargon into an interesting online webinar, lecture, or discussion. For these reasons, it's essential that CME writers can produce the best continuing medical education for professionals and how to teach it in a way that's engaging - particularly when learning online.
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How to Become a Better Facilitator as a Medical Content Writer & Planner
However, before this kind of interactive learning can happen, CME/CE content designers, planners, and faculty need to earn their audience’s trust. That means creating a positive learning environment where participants feel safe to contribute ideas.
Creating a Psychologically Safe Space
Psychological safety is crucial in creating an effective learning environment. When participants in your CME/CE course feel like they belong and can express themselves without judgment, they’re much more likely to engage with interactive activities and group discussions, ask questions, and admit mistakes, all of which combined lead to better outcomes.
Facilitators can establish psychological safety by welcoming participants as they arrive for the webinar, addressing them by name, and creating space for everyone to be heard. By erasing the power dynamics within a group and promoting inclusivity, you can create a sense of belonging and trust.
Another way to increase this sense of safety is openness and authenticity. Incorporating relevant personal experiences or struggles into CME/CE webinars normalizes the learning journey for participants and encourages them to open up about their own, fostering a supportive and collaborative learning environment.
This sense of safety is particularly critical in healthcare and is associated with improved patient safety outcomes, enhanced physician engagement, and fostering a creative learning environment.
Break Up Medical Writing Into Digestible Chunks
It can be tempting to lean into content in an online environment because it makes the experience feel “safe.” You get to talk about what you know well, and the participants get to listen. However, this approach is often the least fruitful because it separates the lecturer and makes it harder to form a connection with the audience.
Add dimension to your CME/CE courses by breaking content into smaller, three-to-five-minute chunks and incorporating interactive elements like polls, breakout groups, and reflection exercises to enhance engagement and retention. You can also try using “ask then tell” techniques to get your participant’s take on an issue before diving into learning material.
CME/CE content is meant to be concise, so the goal here is to make your short time together as meaningful and relevant as possible.
See Facilitators as Guides
By shifting from being the sole provider of knowledge to a facilitative guide, CME/CE educators allow participants to take ownership of their learning journey, which can feel particularly important for adult learners with busy schedules and, in many cases, years of experience already under their belt. These seasoned professionals may not need a long lecture, but they do need a guide who happens to have skills and expertise they don’t have.
Giving your learners more autonomy leads to a sense of empowerment, which leads to more engagement, which in a virtuous cycle, leads to more positive learning outcomes.
As the CME/CE field continues to change, facilitation offers a powerful approach to transform traditional teaching methods. CME writers and educators can use facilitation principles to create more effective and engaging continuing education programs, but you’ll also need to ensure faculty is along for the ride. If you’d like some advice on getting faculty to the facilitation table, check out a session I moderated for CMEpalooza on Practical Strategies for Improving Faculty Teaching Skills.
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WriteCME Pro is designed for CME writers by a CME writer who transitioned from academia and clinical care to building a sustainable CME writing business. Learn more about the key skills medical writers need to grow their careers and other practical, hands-on skills that will help you accelerate business growth when you join the supportive community at WriteCME Pro. Discover how WriteCME Pro can help your medical writing journey. Unsure? Schedule a time to talk with Alex, our founder, about what’s next for your career.
Creating more engaging CME content won’t happen overnight, but you can start honing your skills today with the right resources:
→ Join WriteCME Pro, a CME-specific, skills-based membership for CME writers who are ready to create CME content with confidence.
→ Listen to the Write Medicine podcast or watch our YouTube channel for weekly best practices in creating content that connects with and educates health professionals.
→ Subscribe to the Write Medicine newsletter for tips, tools, and tactics to help you create CME/CE content with confidence