Collaborative Development of a Statistics Microlearning Course for Health Professionals

Teaching is often core to a librarian’s duties. However, at large institutions, there is often not enough librarian manpower to deliver in-person instruction on specialized topics to all who could benefit. In this case, librarians must look beyond the traditional in-person session to deliver educational content at scale. At our library, serving a large healthcare system with 85,000 employees, we constantly tackle issues of delivering library services at scale with limited manpower. In this article, we discuss how we tackled developing an asynchronous microlearning-based course for health care professionals on statistical analysis. We start out with background on microlearning, a strategy for e-learning based on short “bites” of information (Gagne et al. 2019). Then we move on to the process of developing the course, which was built on an existing library program to offer GraphPad Prism licenses to health system employees. We detail how we collaborated with units across the health system, especially an e-learning specialist based in the office of data strategy and the director of biostatistics. We describe in detail the planning and development of the course, including how we decided what to cover, creating synthetic electronic health record data for video examples, and recording the microlearning videos. Thus far, our microlearning course has received more than 1,400 views, which we consider to be very successful. However, our strategy to assess the course could be more robust, and we also talk about future strategies to gauge the success of similar projects.