Faculty Development of CPD Teachers in Low-Resource Environments Post-COVID-19

KEYWORDS:

• Faculty development
• community of practice
• continuing professional development
• continuing medical education
• low-resource environments
• COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated online faculty development (FD), particularly in under-resourced regions where travel by international teachers was curtailed. This promoted creation of virtual communities of practice (CoP) of clinical educators that are intended as hubs of education experience, enabling group mentoring, group facilitation and peer mentoring. We discuss our experiences in this environment, and concepts and structures to support post-COVID online FD.

Ophthalmology FD in under-resourced regions has been traditionally performed by visiting international teachers, for example Training-The-Trainers programme in Africa [1]. In 2019, our group of international ophthalmologists with expertise in continuing medical education, volunteering with the International Council of Ophthalmology (ICO), created a 10-unit online FD programme [2–4]. This combined online learning with social constructivist [5] and experiential learning [6] paradigms and included virtual group-mentoring, opportunities to reflect and receive feedback, problem-solving exercises, and encouraged formation of a CoP. We sought to create a non-hierarchical, interactional learning space to mobilise knowledge and ultimately to prepare future knowledge mobilisers [7]. In 2019–2020, two cohorts of ten ophthalmologists’ educators working in teaching hospitals in sub-Saharan African countries (one English-speaking, one Lusophone) approached the ICO and undertook the programme which was devised for them, with the aim to improve their educational competence in surgical simulation. In brief, we found the learning experience was welcome, learning and competence improvement, and CoPs developed in the short term [3,4].

We assumed that faculty would transition seamlessly to online teaching. However, the need for faculty to develop skills in online teaching is now recognised, and structured courses are being designed, implemented and evaluated [8,9]. Kuntz et al. recently highlighted the usefulness of rapid iteration based on feedback as multi-week courses were developed in a just-in-time manner [10].

A key element of FD in under-resourced environments is “cascading” of skills from international trainers to a pyramid of locally based trainers capable of further cascading knowledge and teaching skills [1]. Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic these cascading CoP [11,12] have rapidly transitioned to entirely online virtual CoP (VCoP) [13,14] of educators, including both our cohorts [3,4]. Extending the original definition of CoP, VCoP membership must include experts in CPD teaching, members must participate in collective learning, and social structures must be created within the community to assist in knowledge creation and sharing. VCoP is not limited to concepts; development of surgical simulators has enabled surgical skill transfer virtually [14].

Buckley recently reported FD bringing four dispersed medical faculty groups together online. She reported usefulness of a co-facilitator to “read the zoom”, the value of participants’ shared interactions and informal conversations, and follow-up communication to sustain interactions [15]. We followed-up inviting participants to reflect about one aspect they intend to change as a result of having participated in the programme and surveyed them six-twelve weeks after the programme’s conclusion which may have assisted in development of VCoP.

Developing VCoP is dependent on members having access to the internet, computers and/or mobile phones, [16] educational offerings usable on mobile phones, and social media [14]. We used WhatsApp to foster communication, exchange administrative information, strengthen personal and professional bonds, and create a safe learning environment. The need to fully engage local society leaders, secure long-term funding, and long-term collaboration is well recognised [17].

In summary, post-pandemic online education grounded in learning theory can widen FD opportunities and support the formation of VCoP in under-resourced settings. Group-mentoring may play a key part in the learning process. Long-term follow-up is required to monitor the effectiveness and longevity of the VCoP. Our continuing work on FD in cataract surgery simulation is underway under the auspices of the Ophthalmology Foundation [18,19]. Further research is also required on transferability of this programme to a much wider cohort of ophthalmologists who are less connected to teaching hospitals in developed countries.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors report no competing interests to declare.