Who should develop massive open online courses (MOOCs) for undergraduate medical education?

Editor – The future of medical education is online and as the world restructures in the midst of this pandemic there is opportunity for this future to be expedited. As a group of medical students from the UK, we have seen great variation in the content of online education provided by medical schools, in lieu of normal teaching, to cater for students currently isolating at home. With the likelihood that online courses will become increasingly integrated into undergraduate medical education we believe there is a need for centralised development of high-quality learning resources.

Online education is not novel, with many medical schools already successfully incorporating methods of online teaching, such as the ‘flipped classroom’ model into their curricula.¹ Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have the potential to become the ‘gold standard’ for delivering learning objectives through interactive online teaching and videos, recommended reading, discussion forums and automated assessments. Successful MOOCs already exist, as demonstrated by a joint project by the University of Dundee and British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), who developed a MOOC to compensate for the lack of standardisation of undergraduate antimicrobial resistance and stewardship teaching.²

Medical school curricula are developed locally around core competencies set by the General Medical Council (GMC), leading to inevitable variation.³ We propose that MOOCs should be designed by professional bodies, such as the royal colleges and national societies (eg BSAC), which are actively involved in creating guidelines, setting assessments and developing training pathways for specialty trainees. Developing an effective MOOC requires establishing a central curriculum, identifying a target audience and creating relevant content.⁴ Now is the time for these groups to assemble expert panels, decide upon competencies and repurpose existing online content or create novel resources.

Medical education is a combination of theory and practical experience, with a great deal of learning condensed into a short period of time. While not all learning can take place online, by moving traditional time-consuming theory-based teaching online there is potential to increase time spent in the clinical environment, arguably the most important part of developing future clinicians. Enabling the best possible learning experience for students requires accessible online resources developed by expert groups. Now is the time to identify the professional bodies best suited to develop MOOCs and encourage them to deliver the future of undergraduate medical education.

• © Royal College of Physicians 2020. All rights reserved.