ALiEMU: Be Free To Learn

ALiEMU is a learning management system that provides open-access, on-demand, and online e-courses for anyone practicing Emergency Medicine (EM) worldwide. “Be free to learn” is our motto, because we believe that quality educational content should be freely accessible to anyone willing to learn.

Since our 2016 launch, we host content created or collected by the ALiEM team. We ultimately envision a robust platform for experts to submit and host their own e-courses, whereupon each will have undergone expert peer review and receive instructional design assistance to optimize online content delivery and learner retention.

ALiEMU Certificates for EM Residency Conference Asynchronous Credit

Educational institutions and organizations are increasingly awarding course completion credit and competency certificates for e-courses. Specifically, the Council of Residency Directors (CORD) in EM and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), have sought to broaden the types of educational experiences available to residents. Previous to 2008, 5 hours of synchronous educational conference time was required for U.S. EM residents per week for didactics. However, through recognition of the importance of asynchronous learning, the ACGME now (ACGME PDF) allows residencies to replace up to 20% of their traditional conference time with asynchronous learning outside the classroom. This asynchronous learning opportunity has been termed Individualized Interactive Instruction (III).

More specifically, to obtain III credit, the 4 below criteria must be met, which is inherent to the foundation of ALiEMU:

Item	III Criteria	ALiEMU Justification
1	The program director must monitor resident participation.	A custom Educator Dashboard has been created in ALiEMU which allows program directors (PD) and associate/assistant PDs to track their residents’ progress.
2	There must be an evaluation component.	At the conclusion of each block, there is a quiz to assess competency.
3	There must be faculty oversight.	Course instructors, who are automatically emailed whenever there is a new comment in the comments section of each block, reply in a timely fashion to the learner.
4	The activity must be monitored for effectiveness.	There is an ongoing, internal quality improvement process as well as a post-block survey to incorporate learner feedback.