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Despite the rapid expansion of online educational resources for emergency medicine, barriers remain to their effective use by emergency physicians and trainees. This article expands on previous descriptions of techniques to aggregate online educational resources, outlining four strategies to help learners navigate, evaluate, and contribute online. These strategies include 1) cultivating digital mentors, 2) browsing the most popular free open access medical education (FOAM) websites, 3) using critical appraisal tools developed for FOAM, and 4) contributing new online content.

There is a paucity of research on the quality and quantity of clinical teaching in the emergency department (ED) setting. While many factors impact residents' perceptions of attending physicians' educational skill, the authors hypothesized that the amount of time residents spend with attending in direct teaching is a determinant of residents' perception of their shift's educational value. Researchers shadowed emergency medicine (EM) attendings during ED shifts, and recorded teaching time with each resident. Residents were surveyed on their assessment of the educational value (EV) of the shift and potential confounders, as well as the attending physician's teaching quality using the ER Scale. The study was performed in the EDs of two urban teaching hospitals affiliated with an EM residency program. Subjects were EM residents and rotators from other specialties. The main outcome measure was the regression of impact of teaching time on EV. Researchers observed 20 attendings supervising 47 residents (mean 2.35 residents per attending, range 2-3). The correlation between teaching time in minutes (mean 60.8, st.dev 25.6, range 7.6-128.1) and EV (mean 3.45 out of 5, st. dev 0.75, range 2-5) was significant (r = 0.302, r 2  = 0.091, p < 0.05). No confounders had a significant effect. The study shows a moderate correlation between the total time attendings spend directly teaching residents and the residents' perception of educational value over a single ED shift. The authors suggest that mechanisms to increase the time attending physicians spend teaching during clinical shifts may result in improved resident education.

In July to August 2014, Annals of Emergency Medicine continued a collaboration with an academic Web site, Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM), to host an online discussion session featuring the 2014 Annals Residents' Perspective article "Integration of Social Media in Emergency Medicine Residency Curriculum" by Scott et al. The objective was to describe a 14-day worldwide clinician dialogue about evidence, opinions, and early relevant innovations revolving around the featured article and made possible by the immediacy of social media technologies. Six online facilitators hosted the multimodal discussion on the ALiEM Web site, Twitter, and YouTube, which featured 3 preselected questions. Engagement was tracked through various Web analytic tools, and themes were identified by content curation. The dialogue resulted in 1,222 unique page views from 325 cities in 32 countries on the ALiEM Web site, 569,403 Twitter impressions, and 120 views of the video interview with the authors. Five major themes we identified in the discussion included curriculum design, pedagogy, and learning theory; digital curation skills of the 21st-century emergency medicine practitioner; engagement challenges; proposed solutions; and best practice examples. The immediacy of social media technologies provides clinicians the unique opportunity to engage a worldwide audience within a relatively short time frame., (Copyright © 2015 American College of Emergency Physicians. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)