Exploring Online Participation and Discussion in an Online Professional Learning Activity on Twitter

Background: Twitter offers opportunities to share resources, engage in online discussions, and network with other professionals. In medical education, Twitter is also being used for professional development. Little is known about the level of engagement in topical chats related to medical education. This study explores how medical educators participated and engaged in Twitter-facilitated discussion activity using #MedEdChat.

Methods: All twitter chat transcripts using the hashtag #MedEdChat from Thursday night synchronous discussions were collected between January and December 2019. A total of 37 discussion topics were included. To answer the first research question about the overall participation, descriptive statistics were used to analyze the number of participants, posts, retweets, and interactions for each week's discussion. To answer the second question about types of discussion participants engaged in during weekly chats, a combination of top-down and bottom-up coding strategy was adopted with three categories: functional, social, and content.

Results: This study identified five themes from #MedEdChat discussions: curriculum, faculty development, scholarship, assessment, and general medical education topics. All discussions had an average of 26 participants, with an average of 145 total posts, including 37 original posts, 52 retweets, and 56 interactions (mentions or replies using @). In terms of types of discussion, content-related tweets were most frequently posted, followed by functional and social tweets.

Conclusion: By identifying the patterns of participation and content of discussions, preliminary findings suggest implications for future study to further explore the social interactions and knowledge building processes among online participants in the Twitter-facilitated medical education online community.