Using a Facebook Group for interactive clinical learning

Background: Facebook is a popular social networking site with more than five hundred million users. This study assessed whether Facebook Groups can be used to teach clinical reasoning skills. Methods: Sixty-seven final year medical students from the International Medical University, Malaysia, were exposed to interactive online learning through a Facebook Group for a period of six months in this study. The purpose was to determine if supervised interactive online learning could be used to augment the deep learning that comes from learning medicine at the bedside of patients. The interactive online discussions were entirely triggered by clinical problems encountered in the medical wards of the general hospital to which these students were attached. Results: A total of 10 topics were discussed in this forum during the duration of this study and an example of one such discussion is provided to illustrate the informal nature of this kind of learning. The results showed a high degree of student involvement with 76 percent of students actively participating in the discussions. Conclusion: The high degree of voluntary participation in the clinical discussions through the Facebook Group in this study tells us that Facebook Groups are a good way of engaging students for learning and can be used in medical education to stimulate creative clinical thinking.