Best Practices for Instagram as a Medical Education Tool – What works and what doesn’t, experiences from a randomized controlled set-up. (Preprint)

Abstract

Background: Instagram is an interactive communication tool with around one billion worldwide users. As a visual communication tool, it has great potential use in medical education. Methods: To assess best practices of Instagram use, regarding account promotion, content creation and evaluation we launched the Instagram account “ilearnonco2021”. Here, educational content was uploaded according to a randomized controlled protocol. Posts accompanied the hematology and medical oncology curriculum. ‘Likes’ were used as surrogate marker for interest. Assumptions based on likes given per post were cross-validated by a separated survey on students’ preferences of content at the end of the teaching module. Results: 49/126 (38.9%) medical students subscribed to the Instagram account, showing a moderate interest. Recruitment to subscribe only succeeded after promoting the account via a personalized email and via the online study guide in addition to official module documents. Overall, single slide posts were liked as often as multiple slide posts. Combining contents on clinical trials with additional information (comic, clinical images, mnemonic) did not increase students’ interest significantly compared to single slides on clinical trials. Posts of the category ‘mnemonics” garnered significantly more interest (p = 0.01) than posts on clinical trials. Likes per post and follower were significantly lower during the trial presented here than in our previous cohort of students. Conclusions: Instagram is a useful tool supporting asynchronous learning albeit not suitable to increase interest in clinical trials. Likes may be used as surrogate marker for interest, results should be however cross-validated by a separate user survey.