Giving recorded video lectures new life

Video recordings of lectures have become common practice in medical education. The problem is that recorded lectures are often left in a media library without guidance on their use after their initial debut, and studies have shown that recorded lectures are only sparingly used by learners. The lack of re-use of video lectures may be due to lack of learner motivation and engagement with the recording when they are viewed alone. Learning from these videos could be enhanced through an active learning strategy. We developed an interactive co-viewing strategy to utilise an existing video library for pain medicine. Pain faculty across the country were encouraged to sign up as panellists for videos that they did not create but were in their area of interest. We hosted a pilot co-viewing event where three panellists watched a video lecture with 25 trainees and provided real-time commentary. Panellists were instructed to pause the video at their discretion during the co-viewing event and (1) share their own experiences relating to the original lecturer's points, (2) identify institutional differences, (3) emphasise important concepts from original lecturer, or (4) explain difficult concepts brought up by the original lecturer in a different way. The panellists were not required to view the video before the co-viewing event but were made aware of the length of the original video (30 minutes) and the duration of the scheduled co-viewing event (60 minutes). Attendees surveyed all preferred this video co-viewing format compared to viewing videos alone or the flipped classroom format. The type of commentary from panellists that were found to be most helpful were comments related to ‘sharing their own experiences’ and ‘identifying institutional differences’. The panel speakers surveyed all reported preparation time of less than 15 minutes. The panellists recommended that future participants be given an outline of video to better plan for their commentary. Overall, all of the participating panellists for the pilot session reported that their own knowledge of the topic was enhanced by participating as a panellist as well as high enthusiasm to participate again. The main challenge was to elicit faculty sign up. We emailed pain program directors and presented the pitch deck to explain the format. We also encouraged junior faculty participation since this experience as an invited speaker at a different institution may enhance their promotional package. In the future, providing additional instructions to potential faculty participants and sharing survey results that confirmed small pre-event time commitment for faculty may be helpful. For the pilot session, we invited pain fellows from across the country to publicise the format and gather experiential data. In the future, the co-viewing events can be scheduled by individual institutions based on local curriculum needs and can facilitate inter-institutional resource and knowledge sharing. Overall, we found this co-viewing strategy easy to implement, captures learner engagement, and minimises faculty preparation burden by effectively utilising existing video lecture material. Nu Cindy Chai: Conceptualization; investigation; methodology; data curation; writing – original draft; project administration; formal analysis; validation. Nu Cindy Chai, MD, declares no conflict of interests. The data that support the findings of this study are available by emailing the corresponding author at [email protected].