Incorporating FOAM into medical student and resident education

Abstract

Gone are the days of solely utilizing textbooks and lectures to teach medical students and resi-dents. Although core content textbooks remain important to teach the fundamentals, free open access medical education (FOAM) can greatly enhance traditional teaching models by exposing learners to cutting edge concepts through a dynamic collection of visual and auditory resources which encourage collaboration, information sharing and knowledge translation. 1 To understand how to best teach today's technologically inclined students and residents, one must understand some fundamental aspects of adult millennial learners. Born into a digital world, millennials have known technology their entire lives. Millennials crave variety, prefer a more informal teach-ing environment, and are comfortable multi-tasking. 2 FOAM fits this bill, as a multitude of pod-casts, blogs and videocasts exists, spanning a wide range of focus areas (critical care, toxicology, ultrasound, etc.). Millennials are more likely to learn when the concepts being taught are directly relevant to their real lives or chosen careers. This concept lends itself well to FOAM, as FOAM-specific search engines exist (i.e., http://FOAMsearch.net) which allow users to choose topics rel-evant to their learning preferences. A resident can quickly access FOAM videos to refresh his or her knowledge prior to performing a procedure in the emergency department; you cannot get more directly relevant to real life than that. Most importantly, residents themselves feel that FOAM is worthwhile to their education. A study by Mallin et al. 3