Reflecting on medical education predictions for 2025: part 2

I’m continuing with last week’s theme and reflecting back on predictions made for what the role of a medical educator would look like in 2025. As a reminder, the editorial titled “Job Roles of the Medical Educator in 2025 (Simpson, Marcdante, et al 2018) lists the six roles required of medical educators by 2025 as follows:

·      Diagnostic Assessor

·      Content Curator

·      Technology Adopter

·      Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach

·      Clinician Role Model

·      Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer

This blog post will focus on the third and fourth roles: Technology Adopter and Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach.

“Technology Adopter: Be an early adopter and fluent in selecting and using appropriate technology tool(s) 

Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach: Guide learners’ use of resources and practice to achieve identified performance targets” (244).

The Technology Adopter is meant to be an early adopter of new technology in the education space, and also to have fluency in selecting and using appropriate technology in their classes (emphasis mine). The Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach is meant to guide learners to select and utilize resources in a way that enables them to achieve identified performance targets, as well as provide personalized and group coaching sessions to ensure that learners are gaining key insights.

I think it’s clear that technology has created major changes in all aspects of work and life, and the role of Technology Adopter has been and continues to be important for medical educators. Because the use of technology is ubiquitous, I wanted to call attention to the concept of fluency in selecting and using appropriate technology in a given class or situation (again, emphasis mine). This phrasing introduces discernment into this role, showing that adopting every new aspect of technology that comes along is not always going to be the best use of time, money, and effort for faculty, students, and schools. The Technology Adopter is using their content expertise to identify new technology that could be used in medical education and then determining its applicability to what is being taught prior to moving ahead with implementation.

I find Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach to be a lengthy title, but I appreciate the linking of these two skills into a single role. The Learner-Centered Navigator piece is focusing on the educator guiding the student toward appropriate resources for achieving their goals. The Professional Coach piece is focusing on ensuring that learners are using these resources in ways that are moving them closer toward achieving required milestones. Bringing both of these roles together will ideally ensure that learners are selecting the right materials to learn from, and absorbing information in a way that helps them progress in their education.

The authors were also prescient in their description of the fourth role when they noted that, “as professional coaches, educators must be skilled in face-to-face and virtual facilitation, to provide personalized and group coaching sessions that support learners’ accurate construction of meaning” (245). They did not know that the COVID-19 pandemic would accelerate virtual learning and work, but even before the pandemic, they knew that the trend was toward an increase in virtual learning and work. They also knew that face-to-face and virtual facilitation require different skillsets, something that is more widely known today by any of us who have had to pivot from in-person trainings to virtual or hybrid trainings.  

As with the first two roles, I see overlap between what is expected of medical educators, and what is expected of educators in general, in 2025. We’ll see if this tendency continues when we look at the fifth and sixth roles next week.

Source: Simpson, D., Marcdante, K., Souza, K.H., Anderson, A., & Holmboe, E. (2018, June 1). Job Roles of the 2025 Medical Educator. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 10(3): 243–246. https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-18-00253.1