Exploring Online Participation and Discussion in an Online Professional Learning Activity on Twitter

Researchers evaluated medical educators' participation and engagement in Twitter-facilitated discussion activity using the hashtag #MedEdChat in 2019. The activity covered 37 discussion topics. Five themes (curriculum, faculty development, scholarship, assessment and general medical education) were extracted from the Twitter chat transcripts. An average of 26 participants engaged in the discussions, with an average of 145 total posts, including 37 original posts, 52 retweets and 56 interactions. The most frequently posted tweets were content-related, followed by functional and social tweets. "Participants engaged in Twitter discussions mainly through providing original claims and building upon others' thoughts, while also generating questions, expressing agreement/disagreement, citing outside information, providing answers and expressing affections," the authors observed. They suggest this preliminary assessment could yield future research areas to delve more deeply into social interactions and knowledge building processes among those in the Twitter-enabled medical education online community.

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