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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Avicenna J Med 2017; 07(03): 103-109
DOI: 10.4103/ajm.AJM_204_16
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

An online academic writing and publishing skills course: Help Syrians find their voice

Ammar Sabouni
Medical school, Kasr Al-Ainy Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
,
Abdelkader Chaar
Department of Internal Medicine, St John Hospital and Medical Center, Detroit, MI
,
Yamama Bdaiwi
Medical school, Faculty of Medicine, Damascus University, Damascus, Syria
,
Abdulrahman Masrani
Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University, St Louis, MO, USA
,
Heba Abolaban
Department of Public Health, Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
,
Fares Alahdab
Mayo Evidence-based Practice Center, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
,
Belal Firwana
Division of Hematology/Oncology, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, USA
,
Ahmad Al Moujahed
Department of Ophthalmology, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
› Author Affiliations Financial support and sponsorship Nil.
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Abstract

Purpose: A group of Arab-American physicians and researchers in the United States organized a blended online course in academic writing and publishing in medicine targeting medical students and physicians in war-torn Syria. This was an effort to address one of the reasons behind the poor quantity and quality of scientific research papers in Syria and the Arab region. In this paper, we report on the design, conduct, and outcome of this course and attempt to evaluate its effectiveness. Methods: The educational intervention was a 2-month blended online course. We administered a questionnaire to assess satisfaction and self-reported improvement in knowledge, confidence, and skills of academic writing and publishing. Results: The course succeeded in reaching more than 2588 physicians and medical students from the region; 159 of them completed most of the course. Eighty-three percent of the participants felt that they were confident enough to write an academic paper after the course and 95% felt the learning objectives were achieved with an average student satisfaction of 8.4 out of 10. Conclusion: Physicians in Syria and neighboring countries are in need of training to become an active part of the global scientific community and to document and communicate the crisis their countries are going through from a medical perspective. Low-cost online educational initiatives help respond, at least partially, to those needs.

Keywords

Academic writing - Facebook - GoToWebinar - medical education - online course - online learning - social media - YouTube


Publication History

Article published online:
09 August 2021

© 2017. Syrian American Medical Society. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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