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Ok. So right now we are live and this is an end of life from med school extra. As am I able to give a little introduction about yourself before you start, please? Uh Yeah, hi everyone. So, um I'm Asim, I'm a phd student in medical education at college University. Um Clinically, I work as a registrar in pediatric emergency medicine. Um I'm also the co founder of a very successful pediatric podcast called Dragon Bites. I work for the Association for the Study of Medical Education, editing their podcasts too. And I'm uh on the trainee committee at the Royal College of Pediatrics helping them develop their assessments for trainees. Fantastic. So anyone who's seeing right now, if you have any questions throughout the time that we throughout this live, make sure to just add it into the chat and then you can go through them at the end. So ask him, would you like to start, please? Yeah, sure thing. Um Let me just share my screen. There we go. So hopefully all of you can see that. Yep, you can see. Amazing. Ok. So what I'm going to be talking about today is um creating digital content as a doctor. Um especially for people who have not done anything like this before. So there we go. So we'll talk first a bit about um my time as a podcaster. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I became a podcaster. Then when I started to realize that there was a whole realm of medical education that would have told me how to do what I was doing better. Um, how I decided to take that to take advantage of that and become a better podcaster following that. I then, um, then what we'll go on to is talk a bit about developing digital content for education. Um, so that can include all sorts of things and I'll give you a few of my top tips at the end about what to, uh, what to do if you do need to make content like this. So, here's, er, Dragon Bikes Pediatric podcast. It's a podcast that I developed back in 2018, 2019. So a few years ago now. So back then I just finished my, um, written exams for membership to the Royal College of Pediatrics. And I was asked by the school of pediatrics in Wales to start helping with teaching. And what I was noticing while I was helping people try to pass their written exams who hadn't passed it already was the things they were failing on were the same topics over and over again. So it would be um it would be things like congenital, cardiac diseases, biostatistics, um er through metabolic conditions, things like that. So I thought, well, I'm working in uh the University Hospital of Wales. This is a tertiary center for the entirety of Wales. We've got a lot of specialists here so maybe I can bring them in to teach this stuff to the trainees who are failing. But then, you know, this exam happens three or four times a year. It seems a bit much task, the consultants to come in three or four times a year to do the same teaching session. So I thought, well, maybe I can just record the first teaching session. Um And then every time the trainees, the next set of trainees come back who want to have some teaching, I can just share the recordings with them. And then I thought, well, if I'm recording it for the trainees in Wales, it's unfair for me to not share it with the trainees outside of Wales. So why not turn it into a podcast? And luckily everyone um in Wales was on board and that kind of led to the first step. I also like, ran into a friend of mine. Her name was um her name is Stacey Harris. Um And um I have an interest in education, but she has a lot more of an interest in leadership. And what she wanted to do was find out about how um pediatricians developed leadership roles throughout the school of pediatrics. Um and whether there was anything we could teach medical students early on about how to become, how to develop those leadership skills. So between the two of us, we developed dragon va more holistic podcast to kind of help all pediatric trainees just get through training both in terms of passing their exams, but also developing their portfolio to become better than the average training. That was the idea. So here's some practical advice on launching a podcast. And my first point would be you have to pick a unique selling point. So there were a number of pediatric podcasts that were already out by this stage. Um before we launched our own podcast and, and but a lot of those podcasts that were out, they tended to focus on general issues within pediatrics. So they weren't very, they weren't necessarily educational, they were more discussions around um problems within pediatrics. What we decided to do with our podcast is focus really focusing very closely on the trainee experience. So we just want to help trainees get through training like many other training programs. Um Pediatrics has a really high dropout rate. You know, there's a lot of people who struggle as they go through the program, both passing exams and getting through assessments and so on. And we wanted to help with that. So just make sure when you're launching a podcast, you pick something that hasn't already been done. Um Then you have to have a think about software. So these are the soft, these are the three pieces of software I use most often. So Zen is a really useful piece of software. I do a lot of my um recording using that. So it's a lot like Zoom or teams where you can have meetings and discuss things with each other. But the advantage of Zen is it allows you to record everyone's audio separately. And that way you can edit the audio together, get rid of any moments where people are talking over each other, get rid of any of the awkward gaps that happen in the recording and it sounds much more smooth and more natural even though you're editing things out of their natural timeline just by using that software. So that's really helpful. Unfortunately, that one involves a subscription. But um it's a really useful pos um bit of software to have. Then there is Reaper. So this is the one that I use to uh edit the podcast together. So I'll record everything on Zanca, download it all and then use Rupa to do all the tricky work of editing it together. The final thing with the headphones is audacity. That's another piece of free editing software. Yeah. II use that when I'm recording people in person because it's really useful for that. Then you need hardware for any, in the case of podcasting, it's largely just microphones and a computer and maybe a Pop Shield. Um And that tends to cover everything you need in terms of hardware. What's worth knowing is it costs real money. So the set up cost for a podcast if you don't have microphones, um And you don't have any of the software you need, it's probably, you're probably looking at somewhere between 204 100 lbs to get set up with a rolling cost every year of between 102 100 lbs just to keep on top of the subscriptions. So it's not a cheap thing to do, even though you're doing it for other people's benefits. Um You need a lot of time to do this. So let's say you record a half hour podcast. Well, that half hour podcast will take anywhere between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours to edit. Um, and then you need to upload it and then there's all the time before the podcast where you've gotta contact people to get them to come on as guests. So overall, it takes about, it takes a long time to put a podcast together. So you need to have that available. And for that reason, you kind of need a team. So when Stacey and I started, we immediately recruited two or three other people. Um so we had five people with our initial team, but now we're up to a team of about 10 people just to keep our podcasts running. Um And it's allowed me to take a backward step and just work as an editor rather than a presenter as often. However, just because you're doing it for altruistic reasons for the benefits of others doesn't mean there's nothing in it for you as an educator. Um So like taking my podcast, for example, uh it's been listened to over 200,000 times and over half of those listeners that are from outside of the UK, from places like Australia and the States and Canada, we have well over 100 episodes nearing 100 and 50. Now, um we presented the data from our podcast, er, er, medical education conferences, both nationally and internationally. Um We've had po elements of our podcast published in a very reputable medical education journal. This one's even called Medical Education and that was published last year on top of that, I managed to meet some really incredible people. Um So, er, for those of you who aren't familiar with these people, er, we've got Zan Vanilli at the top there. He's, uh he's one of the twins who presents the BBC, er, er, shower operation. Ouch. Then we've got um Camilla Kingon in the glasses. So she's the current president of the Royal College of Pediatrics. We've interviewed her as well for the podcast at the bottom. We have Frank Atherton, Frank, um Atherton, he's the CEO for um NHS Wales and we interviewed him for the podcast as well. Um So these are really useful people with huge influence who you can actually get to meet and chat to about important things that affect, um, pediatrics on a national scale. Um, the most important thing is, er, well, perhaps not the most important thing, but it's an additional thing is it gave me a project for my M SE in medical education. So, when I launched this podcast back in 2018, I became, uh, it wasn't long, perhaps a year. And I became very aware that the problem I was having was that I'm not sure if what I was doing was an evidence based by this point, I was uh a year into my um M se in medical education, which I was doing is a three year part time course. Um And it occurred to me that actually, there's a lot of evidence in the world of medical education for how things should be done. And I never referred to this. I just happened to listen to a lot of med Ed podcasts and I amalgamated the things that I thought worked really well into something for my podcast. But actually, I hadn't really looked at the evidence out there. So, a but while I was running this podcast, a number of medical students came up to me and said, well, is there any chance you could record episodes aimed more um at an undergraduate level to teach some very basic stuff around pediatrics for us? Um And I thought, well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it correctly this time round. So, um what I did was do for my M se in medical education. I decided to do a qualitative research project. But before I could do that, I needed to know the background about podcasting, I needed to know what we already knew in the literature. So just starting off with a basic, what is a podcast? I mean, in terms of the word, it comes from a portmanteau of um ipod, which was, you know, they're not made anymore. But that was a big thing back in the day, Apple and Apple, ipod and the term broadcast um when, when they were originally becoming popular. So this was back in the early two thousands, a podcast could refer to several different type of things. So audio casts, podcasts, webcasts, and enhanced podcasts, which are all slightly different, but the word podcast could mean any of them. So the difficulty with the literature is often it would use the term podcast and you didn't know if it meant an audio recording, which is how we interpret a pods in this modern context. But it's not how people saw it back in 2001. It could equally have meant a video recording, something that we would consider a video essay or a vlog would have been called a podcast back then. It could be the thing that we're doing right now. A live web recording that, um, that we're doing, that would have been known as a webcast back in the early two thousands. Um, and then there are enhanced podcasts as well. So these are podcasts that have got additional materials that come alongside them. Um, but all of these would just be called a podcast. Um, and on top of that, the, the other thing that differentiated different types of podcasts were the category it fell into. So there are three broad categories, but these were created, I think back in 2008, um, er, they, they were so podcasts can either be institutional episodic or a books, audiobooks is pretty self explanatory. We wouldn't really think of them as podcasts in the modern context. I think it was even a push of considering them podcasts back in 2008. But yes, I suppose if you've got a textbook and someone is reading it out loud, um, and you listen to it one chapter at a time, you could maybe consider it a podcast. Um However, the other two things are more what we consider podcasts. So, institutional podcasts are those that are recorded by an institution. So normal universities, sometimes hospitals or health boards or Royal colleges, things like that. Um And that's where most of the podcasting was first grown. So, institutions who's really good at starting the first lot of podcasts and then we have episodic podcasts, which I would personally, I would term those um independent podcasts I think is a better term. And th that's those are things like Dragon Bites. Um So those are the podcasts that are made by hobbyists who are just trying to help the world by sharing the knowledge that's available to them. Um And the next part of the literature review is, are podcasts any good from a medical education perspective in terms of teaching students, do they work? And the short answer is well, yeah. Um The first studies looking at podcasts were just trying to prove that they worked. So they would pretest students, um give them some podcasts about what they wanted them to learn about and then test them afterwards to see if after they listened or watched or interacted with the podcast, whether they had actually learned anything. Um and what they found was consistent, the consistent answer was yes, of course, they did learn after they listened to a podcast and their, their post test results were always better than pretest results. However, that's a very um blunt tool to prove medical education effectiveness because any teaching is normally better than no teaching at all. Um So later studies started to compare podcasts to more traditional teaching methods like lectures and textbooks. And in general, what they found was that podcasts were as effective as any of these other means so long as they were done correctly and in terms of getting done correctly, there were lots of other cool findings um regarding this. So, podcasts were good at helping promote career path. So if you were from, if you were a doctor working in something where you weren't getting enough medical students interested in your field, you could use podcasts as a way to promote your field and that will worked really well. Students and healthcare professionals always report liking podcasts and feeling more confident after listening to them. Of course, the pool of people who this was, you know, that these results were taken from was quite biased because these were podcast listeners already. Um But the things they did like was how easy it is to access a podcast and the fact that you can multitask. And I think most of us when we think of podcasts, think about having something playing in the background, when we're doing something else, going to the gym or doing the dishes or chores, things like that. Um Then, then people had a look at um particularly amongst doctors and nurses, what helped improve the educational value of podcasts amongst those groups. Um And there were all sorts of things, you know, like um having podcasts that were segmented well structured, ideally 15 to 30 minutes in length, those sorts of things. So some evidence about around this. So what that helped me discover is where the gap was in the literature because I was trying to produce a podcast for medical students. But there wasn't that much literature out there about medical students. So the two questions I came up with was what motivates medical students to use audio podcasts in the first place? Like, why, why are they so interested in a podcast over going and reading their textbooks? Um And how can if they are going to listen to podcasts, how can the educational value of a podcast be max maximized? How can we make it as useful for a student as possible? So I did a um a large qualitative research study um and recruited a bunch of medical students and interviewed them about this. Um And found what they wanted from podcasts. Basically. Um I presented the findings at an international medical education conference. I'd love to discuss them in more detail here. But one, we're limited on time, but two, I've just written this up for publication and my coauthors are um proofreading it at the moment. So I probably can't not in a state where I can share all the results really. So we have, we'll have to wait until a publication for that. Um However, what it led to in a practical sense was the development of dragon bites basics, which is a subgroup of Dragon Bites podcast aimed at medical students. The episodes are short, they're like 10 minutes in length, they're very well structured and they're aimed at basically explaining very simple medical conditions as simply as possible. So the medical students are better prepared for exams. So that was the idea there. So I think that pretty much brings us to the end of what I want to talk to you about with my podcast as a case study. Um Those of you who are listening here are probably interested in, you know, why in making digital content for yourself? So here are some points as to why it's important to make digital content. So in terms of digital content, I think the better terminology for it is called technology enhanced learning. There are groups for that in as me um the Association for the Study of Medical Education and for a which is the Association for Medical Education in Europe, which is our national and international med ed organizations. Um And they've got subgroups dedicated to this. And what's true is that institutions in particular universities are really good at incorporating technology, the moment it comes around because they want the best for what's available for their students. The other thing that's really true about technology enhanced learning is learners can love it so long as it's produced well by whoever is making it so long as it adheres well to what the learners want from it. And so long as it doesn't seem like a chore learners really love it. However, the opposite is always, is always true. So if it's produced badly, if it doesn't help the learners achieve what they want to achieve, and if it feels really tedious, they're very not interested in this. Um There's always increasing demand for um for um digital education content, particularly in this modern context. So we're now teaching digital natives. So the medical students who are around these days are different from myself as a medical education. For me, the internet didn't show up until my teen years. So a thing, whereas of course, everyone now has been raised with the very much as part of their lives for the entirety of it. And so being digital natives, they're far more used to using technology as part of their learning than someone like me would have been 20 years ago when I was 20 more than 20 years ago when I was doing my undergraduate work. Um The other thing that's really useful about technology enhance learning, particularly for education purposes is if it's better in a post COVID world. So those of you who are medical students during COVID are very well aware of it, but those of you who become medical student since might not have known this. But a lot of the teaching used to be delivered, face to face COVID happened and we were forced to deliver um educational content um from a distance. So there was a lot of distance and technology enhanced learning developed for that. And even, and since then, there have been a number of analyses of the of research that has come out um from different medical education organizations that have pushed for blended learning because there's no point going back to what we were doing before when we found technology enhanced learning works really well. However, there are some things that can really only be taught face to face. So a blended approach of mixing the face to face stuff with tech enhanced learning works really well in this post COVID world that we live in. So the way I was taught about um digital education content was in terms of um presentation, information, interaction, communication, application and course administration. However, this was on an M SE for medical education. So this is a very um institutional heavy perspective on what Med Ed is. This is about uh producing a course, a degree um and how technology can form part of it. However, I want to look at digital education from a different perspective. One I'm more familiar with, which is in terms of free open access Med Ed. So this is the stuff that all of you, all of us now use online for free hobbyists like myself who produce podcasts, but other people who do other things in the world of Med Ed who just make their education freely available but online. Um So we're going to look at it more from that perspective. And when I'm looking at things from that perspective, I suppose the first thing that occurs to me is how do we categorize digital education content? And this is how you should think about it when you are starting to produce what you want to produce and my personal way of categorizing it falls into two groups. So first, I'll categorize it by media format. Um so it can be text based, picture based audio based video based or others. And as you make your way further down that list, you need an increasing amount of technological capability to produce that content. So text to base, for example, is your is the easiest way to do things. All you need is the ability to type and so long as you can type, you can produce content. So here is some really useful content from a Twitter thread and from a blog from Aurora Medical education.co.uk. Neither of these are my own content, please feel free to check them out. Um But all you need, if you can type um and get yourself a Twitter account, you can produce content, um medical education content in that way, another option. If you've got the skills to maybe use can or Microsoft um publisher or other um infer graphical software, you can produce posters or infographics, things like this. This is an example from pe infographics. Um And it's a way of conveying information in a pictorial form which is often easier for people to quickly understand rather than having to use large lumps of text. And this has its advantages too next up an audio based format. So that's what I do. So like podcasts will be the obvious example here. Um And the advantage is this allows for multitasking. However, um you now now need to know how to edit audio, record and edit audio in order to do this a step above this would be video based medical education. So an example of that would be this from, don't forget the bubbles, which is how to drain a Paronychia. Um However, then you need to not only know how to record and edit audio, you now also need to know how to record and edit video. So it's yet again a step above. And then when you get to the higher end of technology, you're looking at developing question banks, developing apps, developing zoo games, things like that. So these are all things that need enhanced skills in tech development. But the current generation of people who go to medical school are probably going to be far quicker adapting to developing these formats than people from my generation. For example, the other way I like categorizing um medical education is in the way in which the user engages with it. So when you're thinking about producing your content, don't just think about which media format suits it. Best. Think about how you want your um your learners to engage with it. So there is passive engagement, which is what say a podcast does or what an infographic does or what text does. That is where you produce the material, publish it and the learners passively just absorb the information in whatever format it is they cannot interact with the information or change what's there or ask further questions. It is a very one way stream of info, then you have active engagement. And I think this really only falls into one realm and that's where, well currently one realm and that's where things like question banks and thirties, things like that. So this is where the user, the learner can interact with your media. But normally it's just one or two points of interaction and it's all the answer to that interaction is prep produced. So say a question bank, you put up a question and your learner reads through it, engages with it and then clicks on the answer. They think it is and that's the active action and then you give them the answer. So either they're correct and you give them an explanation or they're incorrect and it gives them with an explanation, but both explanations are prewritten. They can't ask for more detail, that's all they get. So there's one mode of being active, what's come to the forefront now. And I think what will come even more to the forefront over the next few years is interactive medical education media. So with um the form uh a format of large language learning models like chat GPT, you can probably develop methods of education where there can be a discussion between the educator via this, via a pre rendered um a large language educational media and the learner. So the learner might well be able, you might be able to give teaching via it and then the learner can engage with it and allow and can allow for a much more dynamic learning environment. So that would I think, but that's only really starting to come to the forefront. Now, it would be really interesting to see how the use of chat GPT in similar models um changes the world of medical education. So just to end uh finish things up, these are my top tips for any of you who are planning to develop digital content in, in the world of medical education. So my first point is know what your aim is and try and keep things focused. So as you know what it is that you want to create, however, whatever your aim might be, you need to know what your target audience wants. So unless you're, unless what you're producing is what you, you what the learners who are aiming it at, want in return is pointless producing it in the first place. You should already know what's out there because there's no point in reinventing the wheel. If someone's already doing what you are planning to do, there's no point in you doing it as well. You can either reach out to them and join them and help them with what they're doing. Um or you find um a different niche in which you might be able to offer something slightly different to what was already available, but there's no point doing something that's already been done. The the next point will be check the research. So medical education is around where a huge amount of research is being done, including by my, you know, by myself when I was doing the research for this and myself currently as a phd student. So before you start producing content, see, have a look and see what, what the research tells you you should be doing. Um It's useful to learn about instructional design. So there's a lot of models out there that will teach you how you can develop medical education content or any sort of instructional content. Um So a really good example of this that I'm using for my phd is the ADI model which allows you to go through several steps of developing a new course or instructional instructional content. Um and, and producing in a very evidence based and very structured manner. Um And then the final thing to point out and I think this happens a lot in the world of med ed by accident is don't forget about copyright and citation rules. So we're all used to academic citation, but copyright infringement can happen by accident quite often. Um So it's always tempting to use a picture that's like a famous meme, for example, in order to do some medical education, however, that meme, that picture that you're using probably does belong to someone. Um So have a think about that because you can get called out on it and you can accidentally have copyright infringed. Um So that's all I wanted to talk about regarding um creating digital content as an educator. Um a shameless plug, I'm going to put out to all of you. So that's all of you who are listening to live at the moment. But also if you're listening to this as a recording later on, I'm currently running a phd study trying to help um, the transition from medical student to junior doctor because junior doctor time is fraught. And one of the big things that can be when you become a newly qualified junior doctor is how do you deal with interruptions when you're just trying to do your job and people are constantly interrupting you. Um, I've been lucky enough to talk to a whole number of junior doctors about their experiences. A whole number of medical educators about their thoughts on the matter. What I really want to do is talk to medical students about how they think teaching around this should be incorporated or what, you know, how or what they thought about what they learned about it already, you might well have learned about these things. So if you're a medical student, um, and, and you're grateful for listening to this, um, and don't mind lending me half an hour of your time, I'd be really grateful if you could sign up to my study. If you head to bit bi t.ly/interruption info slash bit dot forward slash interruption info or scan the QR code on screen. Um You can find out more about the project and then I er if you're interested, I can email you um a consent form to join in. All that involves is a half eye interview, but I would really appreciate your time. Um And now if anyone has any questions, I'll leave the QR code up, but I am available to answer anything. Thank you so much for such an informed speech and we really appreciate that. So if anyone who is listening right now has any questions, just add them in the chat right now and we can go through them. If not, I do have some questions that I did write down because I found it quite interesting. So you've mentioned that the one thing that helped you when you were doing your podcast is that having a good team helped quite a lot. So how would you go about finding the right people to form a team for a podcast? Uh So that's a great question. So, um I suppose it's not really about finding the right team. It's just finding people who are enthusiastic. So, um when you enter training or anything as a junior doctor, you find a lot of people are enthusiastic, but um, don't have somewhere to aim their enthusiasm, like they really want to help with teaching, but they don't have a way to do it. So if you're someone and you've come up with an idea and all you do is turn to your fellow trainees or fellow junior doctors and say, look, here's my idea. I could get the ball rolling with this. I know what I'm doing. Is there anyone who's willing to help me? You'll get a bunch of people who are willing to join you. I think we recruited our Stacey and I recruited our first team member who's almost like a third cofounder who was Sophie within our first day. Um And Sophie was someone who really went in the same way that I was helping with written exams. Sophie really wants to help people pass the clinical practical exams and she joined in immediately. Um So you find really keen, enthusiastic people quite early and then, you know, you're all learning the skill. So some people will come to you and they will have skills in hand like I knew how to edit audio so I could take over from that, but others will have their own skills like um Stacey was really good leadership stuff as was a number one of another one of our team members. Um Tom Crom, other people are really good at interviewing. Um So you kind of pick up on what people's skills are and you can use that to your advantage, but also you can all work together to develop those skills. So I would say when it comes to picking your team. It's a case of just ask, there's so much enthusiasm out there. If you've got a great idea, you'd be surprised how many people just want to help you make it a reality. That is really good advice. Thank you for that. So, in terms of making more personal, so what are your next goals or next milestones that you want to achieve with the Dragon Bites podcast or anything in general that you want to achieve in the future? Yeah. Again, a really great er, question. So, um, so the Dragon Bites podcast has been on hiatus for the last year because I've been doing my phd. So I've been too busy, however, we're relaunching um II in the next month or so. Um, because I've got, I've finally got a bit more time on my hands and all my team have been helping me record podcasts in the background. I just need to sit down and edit and start releasing them. Um, so in terms of what we wanna do, we wanna keep um dragon Bites, the trainee bit running and Dragon Bites, um, the undergraduate bit running, if we can as well, that would be really great. But what we've noticed is there has been a massive drop off in general pediatric podcasts. Um, so the Royal College College of Pediatrics has now started releasing the occasional podcast, but general podcasts have kind of like died down as other people are running out of time to edit theirs. So we might find that I'm having to fill the void that I was originally trying to, that was originally occupied. So I had to avoid doing podcasts in that area. So I suspect the next thing that's going to happen is I'm going to be broadening the podcast out. So it goes out to trainee issues and to general pediatrics um to help with people who just don't get their fix of general pediatric podcasts anymore. Ok. That is fantastic. So I wish you all the best in the future for all of that and I hope you achieve all your milestones. So for now, I don't think anyone else has any questions. So I want to take up too much of a time and I think we could end right now. So, thank you so, so so much for this, for this amazing presentation and all the information that you've given is very valuable. I'm sure everybody who is watching this right now took something from this and anyone who else who wasn't able to attend when they watch recording, they can benefit from this quite a lot. So thank you so, so, so much as them and I hope you have a great day and I hope everyone else who's watching has a good day too. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye, everybody. Bye.