Embracing the (r)evolution of social media and digital scholarship in pediatric nephrology education

Free Open-Access Medical Education (FOAMed) has transformed medical education in the past decade by complementing and substituting for traditional medical education when needed. The attractiveness of FOAMed resources is due to their inexpensive nature, wide availability, and user ability to access on demand across a variety of devices, making it easy to create, share, and participate. The subject of nephrology is complex, fascinating, and challenging. Traditional didactic lectures can be passive and ineffective in uncovering these difficult concepts and may need frequent revisions. Active teaching methods like flipped classrooms have shown some benefits, and these benefits can only be multifold with current social media tools. Social media will inspire the involvement of students and allow them to create and share educational content in a "trendy way," encouraging the participation of their peers and thus building an educational environment more conducive to them while promoting revision and retainment. FOAMed also promotes asynchronous learning, spaced learning, microlearning, and multimodal presentation with a meaningful variation. This article discusses the evolution of digital education, social media platforms, tools for creating and developing FOAMed resources, and digital scholarship.

The #Tweetorial: an Underutilized Teaching Tool in Undergraduate Medical Education?

Tweetorials are short, self-contained Twitter threads that provide a concise overview of a topic. Recently, they have gained prominence in the Twitter medical community (#MedTwitter) as a medium for teaching and reviewing topics from foundational medical physiological concepts through to complex clinical case presentations. With medical schools increasingly utilizing case-based learning in their curricula, the Tweetorial may have a role in bridging the foundational and clinical sciences while challenging the clinical decision-making acumen of learners. We outline how Tweetorials may be utilized to support self-directed, asynchronous learning amidst increasingly brimming medical curricula and provide undergraduate medical students real-time access to educators, and discuss limitations that may hamper their implementation.