Cochrane Classmate: a trainer's toolkit to support and enhance evidence production training activities with interactive micro-tasks

Workshop category: 

  • Education and training
Date and Location

Date: 

Sunday 16 September 2018 - 14:00 to 15:30

Location: 

Contact persons and facilitators

Contact person:

Facilitators:

Noel-Storr A1, Dooley G2
1 Oxford University, Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group, United Kingdom
2 Metaxis Ltd, United Kingdom
Target audience

Target audience: 

Teachers and trainers

Level of difficulty: 

Basic
Type of workshop

Type of workshop : 

Training
Abstract

Abstract:

Background:
People often learn best by doing. In response to the frequently asked question, "Can I use Cochrane Crowd for my students?", we developed Cochrane Classmate (https://crowd.cochrane.org/classmate). This tool enables people to use the Crowd tasks for their groups of students. Cochrane Crowd is a platform that offers a range of small, discrete tasks aimed at identifying and describing health research. Many of the tasks are suitable for beginners, and a brief interactive training module accompanies every task. Classmate simply enables trainers or teachers to use the Crowd tasks for their students.

Objectives:
Trainers and teachers will be able to use Cochrane Classmate to create exciting activities for learning about evidence production and synthesis. The tool will allow trainers to create rewarding 'learning by doing' classroom activities using tasks from the Cochrane Crowd platform: http://crowd.cochrane.org.

Description:
The workshop will begin with a short presentation describing the aims and objectives of Cochrane Classmate.

The workshop will then provide participants, working in groups, with the opportunity to create their first Classmate Challenge using the toolkit, involving:

- selecting an appropriate Crowd micro-task;
- deciding on who to invite and what teams to create;
- deciding on the duration of the challenge.

For the final part of the workshop, we will run a live Classmate challenge to further demonstrate how Classmate can be used, and give participants a chance to see Classmate from the student's or learner's perspective.

Relevance to patients and consumers: 

This workshop is primarily aimed at people who might want to use the Cochrane Crowd tasks for a group activity. That activity might be as part of an EBM course or workshop. Many of the Crowd tasks are suitable for beginners and non-healthcare professionals.