Educational Resources

In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. Case in point: A group of CCLCM students took on a faculty role to help train Cleveland Clinic’s frontline caregivers in the event of a COVID-19 patient surge. These middle and senior class students called upon their experience with problem-based learning and adult education to help create dozens of lessons around COVID-19 treatment and care.

Neil Mehta, MBBS, MS, Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean of Curricular Affairs, worked with students to develop the COVID-19 educational content.

“The first step was to create the syllabus and identify learning objectives depending on the types of clinical settings, such as ICU, nursing floor and outpatient, as well as the type of patient, either COVID-19-positive or COVID-19-negative,” says Dr. Mehta. “Next we found publicly available high quality content created by recognized societies and institutions and linked the learning objectives to these. That left some gaps for which we could not easily find this type of content.”

To fill the gaps, Dr. Mehta recruited about 20 medical students, working with pulmonary critical care fellows, and Anchal Kapoor, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, to create the content. The students conducted research and created 15-minute lessons with some self-assessment questions. The content was created in PowerPoint, with narrated recordings, and then converted into videos. The students animated and annotated some slides to improve learner engagement.

The students have experience during their problem-based learning (PBL) activities with developing brief presentations to meet the learning objectives identified by their small group of peer students. Thus, they were able to quickly apply these same skills to develop content for the learning objectives identified for COVID-19 training.

Sidra Speaker (’21), one of the students involved in this initiative, felt well-prepared to contribute, sharing that “It’s so within my skill set.” Within just one week’s time, the students created about 40 lessons, which are hosted on MyLearning, Cleveland Clinic’s learning management platform, and accessible 24/7 to any Cleveland Clinic caregiver. This effort is ongoing, and new lessons are added to MyLearning continually. The content is also now available to healthcare providers everywhere at HealthcareEDU.ccf.org.