2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the advancement of online technologies, there has been a rapid increase in the sharing of information globally, which has led to virtual communities of practice for various types of professions. These virtual communities of practice have been utilized among individuals to improve interprofessional education and interinstitutional collaboration, particularly among those in medical education. Communities of practice are typically groups of people who enrich their expertise through interactions with similar people in their field. By supporting concepts such as community knowledge being greater than individual knowledge and constructivism, (e.g. facilitation, collaborated learning), virtual communities of practice have enabled participants to share their ideas with professionals of different levels of expertise, backgrounds, and locations. In education, participation in these communities can improve instruction and active learning techniques, provide mentoring to support instructors, facilitate pedagogical identity development, and foster collaborations for external funding mechanisms.
The Biomedical Engineering Education Community (BEEC) is a virtual community of practice for biomedical engineering (BME) and bioengineering (BIOE) educators interested in improving educational practices. BEEC utilizes online platforms such as Slack (Slack Technologies LLC., San Francisco CA) and Zoom (Zoom Video Communications Inc., San Jose, CA) to allow educators to communicate through both text and video mediums. The community provides educators with a Slack channel to discuss teaching tips, upcoming funding opportunities, job opportunities, and webinars. The website and Slack channel also provide compiled resources from the BME education community, such as textbooks, websites, platforms for publications and conferences, funding opportunities, and journal articles. In addition, BEEC hosts an annual conference for educators to learn about current topics in BME education and present their ideas and current work in the field. In 2021, BEEC introduced a monthly virtual collaboration event called “Share and Learn”, virtual “brown bag lunch” events hosted via Zoom to allow educators share ideas with their colleagues and possibly form new collaborations. The monthly BEEC Share and Learns have covered a variety of topics and have been led by the broader BME community. An example of the topics covered includes: 1) finding collaborators for large-scale BME research, 2) creating the best BME introduction course, 3) forming effective professional mentoring relationships, and 4) textbook recommendations for various courses. It can be noted that the topics selected span beyond teaching strategies, as BME educators often find themselves involved in greater roles than simply teaching. These Share and Learn events have impacted the BME community by providing a collaborative space for educators to share resources and build collaborations across the nation.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the participation across all these events to understand the roles and types of faculty that attend, which universities they come from, and the perceived utility of the event content for attendees. Through analysis via website and video conferencing platform analytics, as well as a post-participation survey, it was found that an average of 19 participants attended each event, with 53% of the participants being women. In addition, the program had 14 presenters and 90 unique participants from 55 different institutions. Content deliverables from the events included a list of BME textbooks for different topics across the curriculum, websites and application interfaces for mentorship, university resources for undergraduate students, and online resources for teaching design controls, biotransport, thermodynamics, and senior design courses. Analysis of event discussions highlighted the need for BME educators to openly collaborate to be able to share resources and create collective knowledge, as well as perform networking and interprofessional collaboration. This has been confirmed by our qualitative and quantitative assessment through participant surveys and website content engagement statistics.