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ONLINE MEDICAL EDUCATION
WELCOME TO THE FOAM REVOLUTION Have you heard medics talking about FOAM or #FOAMed? What does it mean and what exactly is it? Why are so many people giving up their free time to generate free online content? We explain exactly what it is that everyone’s getting so excited about in free online medical education.
DR TESSA DAVIS BSc(Hons), MBChB, MA, MRCPCH tessardavis@me.com
So what is FOAM? FOAM stands for Free Open Access Medical Education. It’s a collective term for all the online medical education resources that have become available over the last 10 years. The overall aim of FOAM is to maximise online free learning opportunities for health professionals. As online technology has developed, more and more health professionals have been posting free content online. Eventually, it became difficult to keep track of what was available – FOAM is a term coined by Perth-based emergency doctor Mike Cadogan that ties them all together under one name. FOAM comes in many shapes and sizes – there are content, platform and presentation styles to suit everyone’s learning needs.
About the author Tessa Davis is a paediatric emergency trainee at Sydney Children’s Hospital. She created www.guidelinesforme.com, an online, crowd-sourced database of clinical guidelines; www.learnmed.com.au, a not-for-profit social enterprise; and www.iclinicalapps.com, a mobile app development company.
Blogs are popping up all over the place. Individuals or groups with similar interests set up a blog or website where they publish regular posts. These can be specific educational posts where they discuss teaching on a particular topic, or they can be more general posts about a personal experience or learning point. Sites like Life in the Fast Lane, EMCrit, St Emlyn’s and ALiEM are all examples of
great medical blogs. There are hundreds out there – all in the name of FOAM. Twitter is a great way to keep up to date with FOAM. Unlike blogging websites where the posts are relatively long, Twitter is an example of micro-blogging where people post 140-character FOAM snippets. FOAM users put the hashtag #FOAMed in their Twitter posts so you can find them easily. These offer links to other FOAM content, interesting articles, or are short FOAM tidbits themselves.
FOAM content With so many FOAM resources available, there has been a move to start collating FOAM content. GoogleFoam (www. googlefoam.com) is a customised Google search engine set up by Todd Raine. So, if you’re looking for some FOAM information, GoogleFoam will search through preexisting FOAM content for you. For those searching for learning resources, this is great for easy access to FOAM; and if you’re a FOAM contributor it avoids you duplicating content that’s already there. FOAMEM.com is an RSS feed that aggregates posts from all FOAM websites. This means that instead of having to browse each FOAM site individually you can see all the latest posts in one feed.
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