How Well Do You Know Bloom’s? Instructional Design Applications Beyond Learning Objectives (Level 2)

Session Description: Continuing professional development (CPD) is not just a mandate for most clinicians. It's a way to stay abreast of advances in medicine, refine practices that keep patients safe, and promote better healthcare for all. However, expanding one’s professional knowledge and skills takes time, a resource in short supply for many of today’s busy clinicians. In fact, only 4 % of a physician’s workday is unaccounted for by other responsibilities. Couple that with clinicians seeking to improve work-life balance and prioritize their personal wellness, and it’s easy to see CPD can be quickly pushed down the to-do list. Adult learners are motivated by an intrinsic and self-directed need to learn about topics that are relevant and applicable to them. However, in asynchronous online learning environments, this motivation risks being eroded by several factors, including a myriad of distractions and poor course design. For these reasons, mindful instructional design in CPD is critically important, particularly in online formats where visual cues that reflect learner engagement and understanding are absent. Competition among online accredited activities to capture and maintain learners’ attention is fierce. To stand out in the crowd, many instructional designers employ novel and fun formats. However, in the absence of a robust educational framework, chasing shiny objects for attention is to the detriment of the quality of the learning experience.

There are numerous resources available that outline evidence-based strategies to design effective CPD activities, such as the ACCME’s CE Educator’s Toolkit. This toolkit uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to direct the development of learning objectives, ensuring connectivity between the expected change in learners’ knowledge or skills as a result of the activity and the cognitive processes needed to achieve them. However, the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy in the CE Educator’s Toolkit stops after the development of learning objectives.

This session will pick up where the CE Educator’s Toolkit leaves off and lead session attendees through brief, hands-on activities that illustrate how Bloom’s Taxonomy can be used to guide the selection of specific content formats to represent information corresponding to individual learning objectives. This ensures that all the content directly connects to the educational goals, and the time learners engage in the education is meaningful.