Trainee Love and Breakup Letters to NephSIM: A Free, Mobile-Optimized, Nephrology Teaching Tool

What is it about?

It is not known how learners feel about free open access medical education (FOAMed) as they progress through their training from medical school to fellowship. Love and breakup letter methodology (LBM), relatively new in medical education, is a technique that has been used extensively in user experience technology-based research, but has not previously been utilized in evaluating medical education tools. LBM asks participants to creatively write a “love” or “breakup” letter to a product under study to capture their thoughts and emotions when engaging with it. We conducted qualitative analysis of data from focus groups to explore hypothesized that LBM would allow us to explore how attitudes towards a learning platform change at various training stages, and broaden our understanding of how we meet learners' needs through a nephrology FOAMed tool, NephSIM. Inductive thematic analysis revealed that reactions varied by trainee experience and perceived learning needs. Four main themes were seen across all groups: attitudes towards teaching tool, perception of nephrology, learning needs and approach, and application to practice. LBM provided a valuable methodology through which to identify trainee reactions to a FOAMed tool, and highlighted the challenges of meeting learning needs of a continuum of trainees with a single learning platform._x000D_

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