The American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians (ACOFP) is a professional medical association that represents more than 25,000 practicing osteopathic family physicians, residents, and students throughout the United States.
ACOFP had a tradition of learning, but the pandemic of 2020 challenged the organization to provide continuing medical education (CME) credits without in person meetings. Osteopathy is very hands-on. It involves physical stretching and manipulation of the patient. Particularly for the more complex procedures, ACOFP had not created or offered online courses before.
Steve Legault had just started his job as Director of Learning, Knowledge, and Assessment a few months before the pandemic ended in-person training. In his previous role, he had seen how a modern LMS can transform a medical association’s training program and wanted to expand the learning experience for the 6,500 physician members, as well as an additional 18,500 students and residents.
ACOFP instituted Path LMS™ in 2015 to manage certification and ease auditing, but it was not being used to its potential. Not all training sessions at in-person meetings were recorded and captured for their Path LMS site.
Using Blue Sky eLearn’s Path LMS, Legault and ACOFP were able to master better practices and use more video to provide CME to their members throughout the pandemic. Along with the robust capabilities of the Path LMS platform, Blue Sky eLearn's support team was instrumental in setting up ACOFP for future success.
“Even if something doesn’t appear to be possible [in Path LMS], there is usually a way to make it happen with the support of the Blue Sky eLearn team,” said Legault.
ACOFP shifted their focus to center all of their learning content on the platform, making it a practice to record all presentations and panels. Doing so helped them begin to leverage video in other ways; they started pre-recording lectures that did not require interaction and sent film crews to subject matter experts to record sophisticated video training of the more complex osteopathic techniques. All of these are available for on-demand learning on ACOFP’s Path LMS site.
With the new content came the need for improved navigation. Legault likes to provide “just-in-time” navigation for users, and appreciates that Path LMS makes it easy to add buttons, links, and other elements wherever appropriate. “You're looking for something. The experience for the user should be ‘OK. Boom. There it is,’” Legault said.
“Path LMS is extremely user friendly,” he said, “You can come in as an admin and be effective without needing to know HTML, CSS, or that kind of thing.”
Even with all the new content and increased focus on online learning, Legault and his team do not have to manage much technical support for their users. “We don’t get a whole lot of ‘how do I do this,’ ‘Oh I can’t I log in’, etc. We have a single sign-on [with an iMIS Bridge powered by ATS] and because of the intuitive nature of Path LMS it is not confusing to our learners,” he said.
ACOFP continues to build upon their Path LMS site. Legault is positioning one of their courses for students and residents new to Osteopathy. With a collection of 150 videos and quizzes (and growing), ACOFP will be giving program directors additional control and visibility to track learners’ progress via the Path LMS Teams feature.
In addition, Path LMS has helped them partner on a unique program with another Blue Sky eLearn client, the Endocrine Society, to create a shared course on diabetes. Blue Sky’s support helped them create a landing page that mirrors the look and feel of the Endocrine Society’s site to create a seamless learner experience between the two organizations.
Legault pointed out how Blue Sky eLearn’s support systems are integral to ACOFP’s success.
Legault really appreciates the Blue Sky eLearn Office Hours that allow him to “drop in” and discuss any questions with Path LMS experts. Any other time that he has a technical request, the in-app ticketing system is very responsive.
Over the years, ACOFP and Legault have loved having visibility into the Path LMS roadmap and the opportunity to contribute to the direction of development by providing client feedback. He likes that they are invited to beta test new features by their Client Success Manager.
“Weighing in as a client on things that are important, things that you want to see as part of product development, has been huge,” Legault said.
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