Faculty development (FD), or staff development, as it is often called, has become an increasingly important component of medical education. Staff development activities have been designed to improve teacher effectiveness at all levels of the educational continuum. The use of online tools offers many advantages for FD, and online learning can help overcome the numerous obstacles that challenge classic educational activities.Video-based lectures (VBLs) are one of the tools of online learning. This particular instruction format has gained popularity in recent years as a component of the "flipped classroom" (FC) and the much more emergent "massive open online course" (MOOC) styles of health profession education at both under-and post-graduate levels.The aim of this study was to describe the author's experience in developing VBLs to be used as a tool for faculty development in the field of medical education by using Learning Analytics (LA), which is the metadata provided by YouTube, the sharing platform used for the author's videos.A total of 19 VBLs relevant to the education of healthcare professionals was produced by the author with the software program ScreenFlow for Mac to capture and edit video. ScreenFlow also offers the option to combine screen video capture with speaker video recording for simultaneous viewing in the same video. The collected and analyzed data consisted of viewership data, including total number of views, numbers of countries viewing, gender distribution of viewers, and number of YouTube channel subscribers. Descriptive data were also collected: length of each video, watch time in minutes and number of views. Data related to viewers' engagement included number of videos' likes, dislikes, shares, and comments. For the purpose of evaluating audience retention and measuring how well videos maintained viewer attention, the following information was included in the audience retention report: average view duration for all videos on the channel, the average percentage viewed of each video, and the final audience retention.Hassanien M, Abou-Kamer R MedEdPublish https://doi.In conclusion, VBLs can be considered a valuable tool for faculty development in medical education that effectively overcomes many of the common challenges related to this important training process. A variety of software programs and applications are available that facilitate the process of VBL production, particularly the accessibility of many video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube. Moreover, LA is an emerging and effective method for quantitatively evaluating VBLs.LA includes analyzing metadata, which are downloaded from video-sharing platforms and facilitates the evaluation of the acceptability, accessibility, and audience retention of VBLs. That is, the number of views reflects the acceptability of VBLs, and the number of likes/dislikes and shares reflects audience engagement. Likewise, average view duration, average percentage viewed, and final audience retention are indicators of audience retention (AR).Finally, it appears ...

Background: Academic staff members, who are responsible for teaching and training, should be aware of the principle of online course design, development, and implementation. The aim of this study is to evaluate instructors’ skills and needs for conducting distance learning healthcare courses, including the level of assistance they need to implement and use online and software tools in online courses.Methods: The current study applied online faculty survey used by the Center for Teaching Excellence, University of South Carolina to assess the faculty’s instructional technology needs for training and support. The survey asked faculty staff about a broad number of classroom and online technologies, with a helpful response scale that reveals not only what the faculty is already using, but also what the instructors want to use and what they need help with.Results: The results of this study revealed a significant need of faculty staff members for the training and development of their skills in almost all tools used for conducting online courses. The female responder was higher than males. Regarding the use of software, although the majority of participating staff members in this study use almost all software tools required for conducting online healthcare courses, they expressed a need for help in developing new ideas to use the software effectively.Conclusions: From this study, it could be concluded that it is essential to organize comprehensive faculty development training courses for staff members to help them in conducting their online courses or converting their face-to-face courses to blended courses effectively.

With emerge of the COVID-19 pandemic, video-based lectures (VBLs) was widely used as an effective online faculty development tool. VBLs varies from short videos (5-minute) to the long one (1-2 hours). So, the current study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of long VBLs versus short VBLs. A total of 21 short (9) and long (12) VBLs were produced, in 2020, by the authors. The metadata for all of VBLs was downloaded from YouTube [VBLs overview data, audiences’ engagement data, and audience retention (AR) report]. The viewership data included the number of views (4800), watch time by hours (173.6), males to females’ ratio (79/21), the number of the subscribers (157), the video length (2.9±1.2 minutes), number of viewers (241.1±157.8), and the watch time (5.1±3.3 hours). The audience retention is presented as average view duration (1.1±0.4 hours) and average percentage view (42.8±7.9%). Lastly, audience engagement is represented by the number of subscribers (6.4±7.4), likes (9.7±8.0), and dislikes (0.3±0.7). The comparison of the mean audience retention and engagement between short and long VBLs showed that short VBLs had significantly higher number of subscribers and likes as well as the average percentage views in comparison to long VBLs. We could conclude that short VBLs are more effective and efficient as a regard audience retention and engagement. Moreover, the more use of advanced technology for video development makes it more engaging.