There is unmet opportunity for high-quality instruction in continuing healthcare education (CHE). In this session, we will explore the transformative potential of UDL and Instructional Design for improving the quality of CHE. We will demonstrate our program’s success in creating effective, engaging, and inclusive PD for medical professionals worldwide.

Continuing healthcare education materials, including those for maintaining medical licensure, have been characterized as generally lacking in instructional design quality (Kimura et al., 2023; Samuel et al., 2021). Most of the paid content for this purpose is in the form of pure video lecture with minimal and low-quality visual support and little or no interaction (Magwenya et al., 2023). The lack of application of best practices for instructional design and delivery in the context of continuing medical education may be attributable to a number of factors including a generalized lack of time for subject matter experts, continuation of poor quality exemplars, and/or a misconception that because medical providers are highly educated and ostensibly very capable, they do not “need” quality instruction to learn (Magwenya et al., 2023; Samuel et al., 2021). There is opportunity, therefore, to provide a model for developing and distributing continuing healthcare education offerings that reflect best practices for learning and which support learner variance. At our organization, we have built a program over three years that espouses practices associated with instructional design theory and practice and utilizes principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accessibility. The result is high quality, highly engaging, interactive, and robust asynchronous online learning experiences that bring quality continuing healthcare education experiences to medical professionals anywhere in the world. Our approach incorporates micro-credentialing alongside formal continuing education credits, enhancing learner engagement. Finally, we have developed a comprehensive process for evaluating courses prior to piloting, after piloting, and following implementation. Data from these evaluations inform prototype design, course revisions, ongoing course maintenance after implementation, and design templates for future courses. In this session, learners will be invited to move through a sample module in one of our courses and will collectively reflect in a comparative analysis of the same content presented in a “traditional” video experience compared to our model of robust interactive learning. We will discuss methods for designing courses utilizing ID and UDL principles and practices, working with medical SMEs, and processes for building a robust ID program within a healthcare organization. Participants will leave with a clearer conception of the value of applying best practices related to ID and UDL to continuing healthcare education, transferable ideas for getting started with establishing programs for instructional design in healthcare organizations, and resources to guide early implementation and scaling efforts. References Kimura, R., Matsunaga, M., Barroga, E., & Hayashi, N. (2023). Asynchronous e-learning with technology-enabled and enhanced training for continuing education of nurses: A scoping review. BMC Medical Education, 23(1), 505. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04477-w. Magwenya, R. H., Ross, A. J., & Ngatiane, L. S. (2023). Continuing professional development in the last decade – A scoping review. Journal of Adult and Continuing Education, 29(2), 408–437. https://doi.org/10.1177/14779714221147297. Samuel, A., Cervero, R. M., Durning, S. J., & Maggio, L. A. (2021). Effect of continuing professional development on health professionals’ performance and patient outcomes: A scoping review of knowledge syntheses. Academic Medicine, 96(6), 913–923. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000003899.