Free Open Online Emergency Medicine Course for Medical Students

Dear colleagues,

I hope this message finds you well in the busy and risky days of COVID-19. 

As known by most of you, the International Emergency Medicine Education Project has been providing free emergency medicine educational resources for medical students since June 2018. Currently, content produced by 175 contributors from 27 countries reached thousands of students from 197 countries around the globe. 

COVID-19 pandemic made many differences in our lives. Education is no exception to this. Because of the pandemic precautions, medical students miss their normal course of education. This may be a bigger issue in countries lacking e-learning options. Therefore, we have been thinking of ways to help students and educators who might be needing such a resource. 

As some of you might know, we were already planning to start a MOOC for medical students in upcoming years. However, COVID-19 forced us to fasten our plans. We have been working for a solution to help students and educators, who lack the means to continue their education activities. Finally, we managed to create a platform: iem-course.org. This platform is designed to provide free online emergency medicine courses for medical students. 

In this platform, we activated the first course, “Emergency Medicine Core Content Course.” It is a 4-week course, covering 11 core topics of emergency medicine. The course includes video and reading assignments, multiple formative quizzes. In addition, if students prefer to receive a course completion certificate, they can take the summative assessment at the end. The reading assignments are curated from freely available online resources (e.g., iEM Education Project 2018 eBook and Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s CDEM Curriculum chapters). Videos are provided by Lecturio, and all emergency medicine videos (200 items) are freely available for students who join the “iEM/Lecturio Emergency Medicine Core Content Course.” All students around the world are free to register and use the resources provided in this course. 

We hope that this course may help students and educators to overcome educational challenges related to pandemic. We consider this initiative as our responsibility to our international community in these difficult days. We thank all emergency medicine societies, organizations and institutions that endorsed and supported us since the beginning. We are grateful to our contributors, who made creating a project like this possible by writing chapters, providing images and videos. If you are interested in contributing, please let us know by e-mail.