Learner Engagement is a Key to Educational Effectiveness

Over the past three years tens of thousands of clinician learners have participated in hundreds of ArcheMedX-powered Activities developed by the educational community. Analyzing the data generated across these diverse online educational interventions has revealed key insights into how the Learning Actions Model and award-winning ArcheViewer eLearning platform can be utilized to more effectively and efficiently transform online education.

For example, our initial data found that ArcheViewer-powered education resulted in completion rates (more than 75% on average) that were two-to-three times greater than traditional industry benchmarks. And research shared in the fall of 2015 and demonstrated that the more interactive nature of ArcheViewer-powered education is four-to-six times as effective as traditional online education.

Recently, the ArcheMedX team began working to examine a more expansive data set to answer increasingly complex and important questions. In other words, now that prior research has shown that the Learning Actions Model and ArcheViewer are two-to-three times as sticky (completion rates) and four-to-six times as effective (assessment performance) as traditional online education, the educational community can now begin to explore the key question, “Why does it work so well?”

The simple answer is “learner engagement”. After analyzing results across tens of thousands of learners and hundreds of online educational interventions, the data clearly demonstrates that the more engaged a learner is throughout the learning experience the greater the educational impact.

This chart shows 3,214 learners ranked by engagement level (as defined by the number of learning actions they took while consuming content in an ArcheViewer-powered Activity). We then analyzed their pre/post-test performance by quartile and compared the increase in effectiveness to the least engaged quartile of learners.

Our latest White Paper (download here) dives deeper into this data set and explores why learner engagement is so critical to educational effectiveness. The resulting analysis provides a series of best practices the educational community can leverage to optimize their online educational interventions.

As a sneak peek into these new data, three separate but connected research projects were undertaken. One in collaboration with the team at Antidote Education Company (Antidote), another in collaboration with the combined teams at AcademicCME and Postgraduate Institute for Medicine (PIM), and an internal project at ArcheMedX that analyzed data across hundreds of learning Activities and thousands of additional learners. The goal for this research was to better understand why the interactive educational interventions powered by the ArcheViewer have such transformational impact on learning and clinician learners. In short, we learned the following:

1. By collecting and analyzing data from tens of thousands of learners participating in ArcheViewer-powered educational Activities we can move from simply measuring ‘if interventions work’ to more precisely determining ‘why and how they worked’, which in turn established a series of best practices the educational community can leverage.
2. By comparing sub-populations of learners who engaged in ArcheViewer-powered learning experiences before and after intentional design improvements were made, the data suggests that the ArcheViewer suite of Activity Tools allows Partners to refine and optimize their interventions over time.
3. By exploring two large, diverse data sets, the data determined that learner engagement – in keeping with the Learning Actions Model – is a critical determinant of educational effectiveness.
4. By correlating a Partner’s approach to leveraging the Learning Actions Model and the average learner’s engagement across a sampling of Partners, the data have begun to define the optimal design intensity.
5. And, by segmenting learner data by clinical specialty, the data demonstrated that specialty in-and-of-itself imparts minimal if any discernible difference in the ArcheViewer-powered learning experience or educational effectiveness.

In the end, these findings strengthen the resolve at ArcheMedX to empower the community of healthcare educators with a transformational approach to more effective online learning. Continuing this analysis and interpretation of learning data helps to ensure that each Activity and each learning experience Partners create provides the impact and value that the community is passionately dedicated to achieving.

To learn more about the direct implications of this research on the learning activities that you are designing please download the White Paper.

To schedule a demo of the ArcheMedX Learning Actions Model, the ArcheViewer, and the learning platform’s latest enhancements please contact the ArcheMedX Partner Support Team by emailing [email protected].

* Acknowledgements:

The interventions explored within this research and therefore the research itself would not have been possible without the direct research partnership with Antidote Educational Company and AcademicCME along with additional efforts of ACHL, AKHCME, American Academy of Pediatrics, Imedex, MedIQ, NACCME, NCQA, PIM, University of Nebraska, University of North Texas, and University of Virginia. Moreover, these interventions and this resource would not have been possible without the generous financial support from Astellas Pharma US, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Celgene, DAIICHI SANKYO, Exact Science, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Covidien, Incyte, Jannsen Biotech, Lilly, Lundbeck, Merck, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Novartis Oncology, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., an Amgen subsidiary, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Pfizer, Pharmacyclics, PharmaEssentia, Prometheus Laboratories, Regeneron , Sanofi US, Seattle Genetics, Takeda, TESARO, USB.