Using Competency-Based Digital Open Learning Activities to Facilitate and Promote Health Professions Education (OLAmeD): A Proposal

BACKGROUND: Traditional learning in medical education has been transformed with the advent of information technology. We have recently seen global initiatives to produce online activities in an effort to scale up learning opportunities through learning management systems and massive open online courses for both undergraduate and continued professional education. Despite the positive impact of such efforts, factors such as cost, time, resources, and the specificity of educational contexts restrict the design and exchange of online medical educational activities. OBJECTIVE: The goal is to address the stated issues within the health professions education context while promoting learning by proposing the Online Learning Activities for Medical Education (OLAmeD) concept which builds on unified competency frameworks and generic technical standards for education. METHODS: We outline how frameworks used to describe a set of competencies for a specific topic in medical education across medical schools in the United States and Europe can be compared to identify commonalities that could result in a unified set of competencies representing both contexts adequately. Further, we examine how technical standards could be used to allow standardization, seamless sharing, and reusability of educational content. RESULTS: The entire process of developing and sharing OLAmeD is structured and presented in a set of steps using as example Urology as a part of clinical surgery specialization. CONCLUSIONS: Beyond supporting the development, sharing, and repurposing of educational content, we expect OLAmeD to work as a tool that promotes learning and sets a base for a community of medical educational content developers across different educational contexts.