Introducing an Online Orientation Module to Integrate New Learners in Military Medical Education

Brief Overview

This session will present a case study of an Online Orientation Module that has been adopted by the Graduate Programs in Health Professions Education (HPE) at a national university. As Health Professions Education (HPE) programs increasingly embrace online learning, unique distance learning populations like military service-members require specific attention to issues like secure internet access, geographic dispersion, and learner isolation. The HPE program developed the Online Orientation Module to specifically address the adult learning needs of military health professionals.

Introduction/Problem statement

The field of Health Professions Education (HPE) continues to recognize and embrace the growing popularity of online education in order to best serve its diverse learner populations. Of all global master’s programs in HPE, more than half are offered in fully online or blended (face-to-face and online) formats (Tekian & Harris, 2012).

Learners pursuing degrees or certifications in HPE come from a diverse pool of professional and personal experiences, connected by a motivation to improve the intersection of public health and education. They are surgeons, medical practitioners, residents, nurse practitioners, program officers, and social workers. They serve as administrators, program directors, supervisors, and teaching faculty, and work in hospitals, universities, governmental agencies, and non-profit organizations. This extreme diversity is an essential element of HPE programs: to effectively improve the delivery of medical care, multiple stakeholders at multiple procedural points must be committed to optimizing their own training. Yet, this diversity also makes standardization of learner experiences and integration a daunting challenge.

In addition, one of the premier HPE training programs specifically targets the U.S. Military Health System and U.S. Public Health Service. The Graduate Programs in HPE at one national university offer part-time online HPE certificates and degrees for members of the military and government communities dedicated to improving their publicly funded delivery of care. Notably, this unique population adds a further degree of diversity to HPE programs: it involves the training of military medical personnel who are stationed across the globe, often in wildly disparate geographic locations and timezones. They can be deployed on short-notice, or have their permanent stations changed unexpectedly. Their internet access is highly regulated according to individual work sites’ security provisions, and their forms of digital communication vary based on location. In short, the HPE Program is necessarily comprised of one of the most unique adult learning populations among online learning programs.

Providing a sense of familiarity with programmatic standard operating procedures for such diverse learners, in addition to providing them a crucial sense of social connectivity, is an enormous challenge-- yet, both are just as necessary for promoting learner success as they would be in traditional face-to-face learner populations. Thus, we developed an Online Orientation Module designed to take into account the unique needs of these professional learner populations.

The Orientation Process at USUHS

Orientation program best practices center around preparing the learner to transition into their new learning environment. Traditionally, key objectives of orientation modules include facilitating academic/social interactions among new learners, increasing student involvement, enhancing a sense of belonging to a specific learning community, and improving overall learner retention (Scagnoli 2001; see also Robinson, Burns, & Gaw, 1996). However, when dealing with unique populations not all these criteria necessarily apply in the same way. For example, the Health professionals in our program are highly motivated with fully established learning skills and strategies. It becomes important to develop a program catering to their individual needs.

As part of the development of a structured five-step onboarding process for HPE learners, HPE faculty recognized the need for a specific orientation process that would actively cultivate both institutional familiarity and social connectivity. As a result, they innovated the HPE Online Orientation Module: a specific course site hosted on the internal learning management system (LMS) that approximates a standard orientation program-- but for a group of learners with a very unique set of needs.

Specifically, the HPE Orientation Module was designed to target four general orientation needs: (1) Completing standard entry forms (in which learners submitted individual forms collecting their current demographic data, program-wide video user agreements, etc.); (2) Getting to know the program’s processes and fellow learners (in which learners reviewed the program Handbook; participated in an online introduction forum with each other, etc.); (3) Beginning initial program assignments (in which learners drafted personal statements, practiced uploading assignments in the LMS, etc.); and (4) Learning how to stay connected to the program’s day-to-day operations (in which learners subscribe to the course calendar, check their email, etc.).

Each section of the Online Orientation Module includes an individual checklist for completion, how-to videos for specific tasks, links to relevant resources, and in the case of discussion boards, active participation on the part of both faculty and the learners.

Session Format & Audience Interactivity

This session will be structured as a Discovery Session and the presenters will use a dialogic approach to the presentation. The presenters will involve the participants in conversation about the scenario and include the participants’ contexts in their presentation.

The 15 minute session will be formatted as follows:

2 mins: What categories of diverse learner backgrounds exist across various institutions? What orientation programs/activities for learners are you familiar with

2 mins: Context of the university’s HPE program

7 mins: Presentation of Orientation Module

4 mins: Discussion with participants regarding the model and its replicability

Audience Takeaways

At the end of this session, the audience will be able to:

• Describe the existing Orientation Module used by the presenters.

• Introduce/integrate Orientation Module elements into their own program.