Utility of whatsapp®in teaching hematological disorders

Background: Innovations are always part of any field. The field of medical education too has experimented with various teaching modalities. The use of social media has been one such platform for disseminating medical education. With the rapid penetration of mobile internet, the increasing popularity of smartphones and the accompanying proliferation of smartphone based applications have opened new avenues to the current age tech savvy medical teacher to experiment with such innovative resources like chat application based medical education.
Methods: This study was conducted to study the utility of the WhatsApp® based group discussion in a group of students of 2nd year MBBS. The ten week online group discussion was conducted on hematological disorders.
Result: Although the number of participants (n=91) in this group activity exceeded the non participants (n=33), the scores obtained by the students in the WhatsApp® group was slightly better for two learning objectives. Also the methodology adopted was noted to be popular with 98% of the participants.
Conclusion: This indicates that this methodology can add flavor to the existing methods and also give an opportunity to interact with his/her teacher in real time. Refinements in the utility of this mode of teaching can be done by further studies in this field and learning from other educators’ experiences.