Role of AI in Health Professions Education

Role of AI in Health Professions Education

Poh-Sun Goh

27 June 2023, 0345am, Singapore Time

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only a "hot" subject, AI in Health Professions Education (HPE) is topical, trending and trendy. There is a sense that AI has reached a tipping point for widespread adoption, through open access websites (https://chatgpt-online.ai/), mobile Apps (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-chatgpt-app-for-ios), and increasingly being embedded as co-pilots in commercial and familiar enterprise software and platforms (https://sway.office.com/BnO7YrlOdmcDNp8c?ref=Link - see AI in Education section).

Fundamentally, AI can 'augment' human intelligence, through intelligent searches, e.g. AI algorithms underpinning online search engines guiding inquiry toward what other users have found useful and relevant (through number of views, time spent engaging in content, click throughs, recommending this content to other interested users and 'citations' or linking to search results); and being 'an instructor or tutor at our side' (Goh, 2020). Increasingly accessible, usable and workable AI will complement and selectively supplement our human role as instructors, educational guides, trainers, mentors and coaches; though it is likely that we will retain a distinctly human role if we focus on deeper individual customised engagement, to facilitate deep learning, by investing time, energy and effort to understand our human learners. This will require us as educators to skill up, and build not only digital literacy in AI, but also distinctly human skills and insights, into people (Shorey, Ang, Chua and Goh, 2022). 

It is very likely that the speed of individual and collective active exploration into the use of AI, building up empirical experience, use cases and examples, developing principles of professional practice and guidelines on proper usage, building theory, engaging in iterative rapid innovation using applied design thinking - ultimately refining the principles, practice and pedagogy of AI, will be faster that the cycle times for traditional peer reviewed publications. There will be a major role for the professional use of social media (including blogging) as content creation, curation and aggregation platforms to engage members of a professional Network, and Community of Practice (CoP). The dynamic and potentially more responsive nature of newer forms of digital scholarship and Micro-Scholarship (Goh, Roberts-Lieb and Sandars, 2022) will complement and add to traditional scholarship venues of academic and professional conferences, and peer reviewed publications, as we build up our experience and confidence in the use of AI in HPE, and understand its role in HPE.

References and Further Reading

Goh, PS. (2020). Medical Educator Roles of the Future. Med.Sci.Educ. 30 (Suppl 1), 5–7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-020-01086-w

Sandars J., Goh PS. (2020) 'How to make it work: a framework for rapid research to inform evidence-based decision –making about the implementation of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic', MedEdPublish, 9, [1], 154, https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2020.000154.1

Goh, PS. (2021). 'The vision of transformation in medical education after the COVID-19 pandemic'. Korean J Med Educ. 33 (3): 171-174. https://doi.org/10.3946/kjme.2021.197

Shorey, S., Ang, E., Chua, J., & Goh, P. S. (2022). Coaching interventions among healthcare students in tertiary education to improve mental well-being: A mixed studies review. Nurse education today, 109, 105222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2021.105222

Goh, P. S., Roberts-Lieb, S., & Sandars, J. (2023). Micro-Scholarship: An innovative approach for the first steps for Scholarship in Health Professions Education. Medical teacher, 45:3, 307-312. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2022.2133689