From the pandemic's front lines: A social responsibility initiative to develop an international free online emergency medicine course for medical students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted medical education and forced medical schools to shift to remote teaching. However, in many institutions, this shift was complicated by the lack of previous experience and resources as well as the decreased educational time and effort due to increased clinical load. In April 2020, the International Emergency Medicine (iEM) Education Project embarked upon a social responsibility initiative to ease and facilitate this transition for emergency medicine clerkships. A 4-week open online emergency medicine core content course for medical students covering 11 lessons and 37 topics was created. This course contains a total of 25 hours of content, 66 chapters curated from the free iEM Education Project 2018 eBook and Society of Academic Emergency Medicine curriculum website and 131 videos granted freely by the commercial medical education resources provider, Lecturio. In the first 24 hours, the website was visited 3127 times from 57 countries in 6 continents. While online teaching is not a substitute for in-person clinical teaching, such initiatives can provide resources to clinical teachers who are overwhelmed with clinical duties and an opportunity for medical students from low-resource settings to continue their training safely during the pandemic.
Competing Interests: iEM education project is a non-profit project aiming to provide free emergency medicine educational resources for medical students and educators. It has been endorsed by the IFEM and many international emergency medicine organisations including African Federation for Emergency Medicine. We thank all societies, organisations and institutions that endorsed and supported the iEM Education Project. We are grateful to our contributors, who made the creation of a project like this possible by providing free resources. We thank Lecturio for granting free access to their emergency medicine content. We thank United Arab Emirates University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, which covered the project's hosting expenses, for their continuous support. The authors declared no further conflict of interest.
(© 2018 Published by Elsevier Ltd. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.)