Twitter as a tool to enhance student engagement during an interprofessional patient safety course

Abstract

Twitter and other social media forums are gaining popularity in both the academic and conference arenas as tools to increase participant engagement, attention and interaction. While Twitter has been used successfully to engage college students, it has not been explored for use in an interprofessional curriculum. We sought to explore it as a method to foster student engagement. During a weeklong interprofessional patient safety course we invited students and faculty to participate in a Twitter conversation. It was found that this form of social media successfully captured a “behind the scenes” conversation and the experiences of the students which would have not been otherwise captured. This information is guiding future interprofessional educational programming in both the medical and nursing schools.

• Interprofessional education
• patient safety
• social media
• student engagment
• teamwork

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Dr. Joseph DeSantis for his assistance with this project.

Notes

¹See: https://twitter.com/

²The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet (an online message). It was created as a way to categorize messages.