ID Digital Institute (IDDI)
What is IDDI?
The ID Digital Institute is a free program and community that aims to facilitate collaboration among ID educators and exploration of digital technology to create learning and teaching opportunities. This program is composed of a group of volunteers who mentor and guide learners as they progress through a one year long curriculum focused on digital education skills, such as blogs, infographics, podcasts, and more! Our vision is that program graduates will remain part of the ongoing IDDI global community of practice and will help build effective and compelling content for our ID world!
Applications for 2025 are open!
Want to enhance your skills in digital education and social media?
Apply for the Class of 2025 at https://forms.gle/KHnVv8P9GNTpXhJ78
Digital platforms have become increasingly ubiquitous for teaching and learning medicine among trainees and faculty. Medical educators need to be adept with these digital mediums and social media platforms to evolve and adapt, but many may find getting started overwhelming. Creation and curation of effective digital education resources as well as engagement in social media are skill sets that can be built with training and practice.
The goal of the ID Digital Institute is to cultivate leaders of digital education in infectious diseases by fostering skills, competence, and professionalism using digital platforms and social media.
- Recognize and master essential/foundational digital education platforms, such as social media, blogs, visual communications, and podcasts
- Create content and determine the appropriate digital mediums for teaching about relevant ID topics
- Apply professionalism best practices with social media interactions
- Facilitate peer mentorship, promote academic advancement, and grow a community of digital educators within ID
IDDI Rotations
The IDDI curriculum exposes learners to the diverse aspects of digital education and social media as well as provides opportunities to directly participate in projects. There are five rotations which are 2 months long each. The rotation curriculums are made with the extra built in time as we know that life and clinical service can be busy at various points of the year. A quick summary of the rotations are noted below:
The core introductory block assists participants in understanding the current scope, breadth, and role of digital education in medicine and infectious diseases. Learners will establish their social media mission and apply best practices related to social media etiquette. This introduction block will also weave in basic background theory for effective teaching strategies for adult learners, which will be noted in future rotations.
- Learners will also be introduced to project management and educational portfolio design, which they will continue to work on throughout the longitudinal program
Building off of the previous block, learners will take a deeper dive into the use of social media platforms to create educational content
Participants will learn the basics of website management and will be provided mentorship on the creation of individual blog posts. In addition to competence with fundamental website design, learners will also compare digital platforms that provide question delivery and gamification tools for learning. They will use best practices to create formative questions to share with ID trainees.
Learners will rotate through visual communications to focus on the principles and strategies for creating effective multimedia educational materials. This will focus on developing a comfort with infographic and visual abstract construction, and active participation will help develop transferable skills that are instrumental for future publications and digital education resources. In addition, learners can also focus on educational videos as well if they desire.
Participants will learn the process behind the production of a podcast episode or series so that they master the basic skills of script production, recording, and editing. In addition, learners will be able to describe strategies to incorporate podcasts into teaching.
- IDDI Incubator Sessions: Along with the rotations above, the program will offer additional opportunities through our IDDI Incubator! These will be standing synchronous sessions will be held monthly to allow the IDDI Fellows to interact with experts in digital education and one another. These will provide opportunities to discuss various topics in social media/digital education as well as time for the IDDI community to share ongoing progress on various projects. All of these conferences will be recorded so that they can be viewed at another time.
- Educational Theory: Although introduced in the first block, concepts from fundamental learning theories will be built into and reinforced throughout the subsequent blocks. This will help program participants understand items such as creating educational objectives, matching appropriate digital tools to content, and how to construct an project in the future
- Educational portfolios and academic advancement: During the program, participants will build and edit their personal educational portfolio with advice on incorporating digital education into their careers from various experts in this space
IDDI Incubators at IDWeek
