What happens to your feedback?

Listening to your feedback continues to be at the forefront of ensuring the EASD e-Learning programme is up to date, evidence based and meets the needs of our learners.
You may recently have read about some changes we made to the e-Learning platform to make it easier for you to let us know what you think about our courses and alert us to any technical problems. When you sign into the platform, to the right of the screen – wherever you are on the site – there is now a toolbar, which includes a number of options to help you communicate with us.
If something isn’t working the way you expect it to, you can click on ‘Report a technical problem’ and a short form will be presented. This feedback is monitored on a daily basis during the week and you can expect a response within two working days.
Alternatively, if you notice something that needs changing in the content itself, or there are topics you would like to learn more about, you can use the ‘Feedback on course content’ button.
For other general enquiries, there’s a simple ‘Contact us’ button.
To support the dialogue between us and our users further still, the toolbar contains a ‘Your messages’ button, where you can access correspondence about issues you’ve raised with the e-Learning team, all in one place.
And if all else fails, you can still use our original green ‘Provide course feedback’ button below the content ladder to the left of the page.
What happens to your feedback about a module?
Learner feedback for each module is reviewed on a monthly basis. A summary of the feedback for the month is produced and highlights are shared with module authors. A member of the feedback team may contact a learner who has provided their email address to respond to any specific queries.
All of the learner free-text feedback is collected and organised into themes and forms part of the periodic review process whereby each module is reviewed to ensure it is fit for purpose.
Module assessment
One significant theme we have seen in your learner feedback has been requests for more clinical case studies. To address this feedback we have been working with our authors and other experts to build up the number of self-assessed cases studies in each current module. It is expected that this project will be on-going until at least the end of the year but the work to add these to the e-Learning platform has begun. As we write, the following modules have had new case studies added to them:
- Diabetes and the kidney: Module 1
- Hypoglycaemia: Module 1
- Insulin resistance: Module 1
- Management of hyperglycaemia in type 2 diabetes – ADA/EASD consensus report (2018) and update (2019)
- Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: Module 1
- Phenotypic variability: Module 1
Some of our learners have also asked for more assessment activities. This feedback, together with feedback from a review of our assessment strategy, led to us to begin a project four months ago to strengthen the end-of-module assessment and move from five questions to 10. In addition, many of the questions will be based on clinical scenarios to enable learners to apply their knowledge to clinical practice. The modules listed above have all moved to this new format.
Launch dates
We received learner feedback asking us to include the date on which individual modules were launched. In response to this, we have added launch dates retrospectively to all of our existing modules and will be including this information as we launch all new modules from now on.
New courses and modules
Many of you have put forward suggestions for new courses or new modules within existing courses. The e-Learning team review these suggestions regularly. So far in 2021 we have launched the following modules:
- Cardiovascular health and diabetes. Module 7: Heart failure on trial – DAPA-HF and EMPEROR-Reduced
- SGLT-2 inhibitors. Module 8: The VERTIS CV trial
- SGLT-2 inhibitors. Module 9: Renal outcomes clinical trials update
- Insulin resistance. Module 1: Insulin resistance, the metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes
- Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Module 1: NAFLD – epidemiology, pathophysiology and diagnosis
- Hypoglycaemia. Module 1: Reducing hypoglycaemia
- Metabolic surgery. Module 1: Mechanisms of metabolic surgery
- Metabolic surgery. Module 2: Metabolic surgery for obesity and type 2 diabetes
We continue to aim to launch one new module a month and, in September, at the 2021 Virtual EASD Annual Meeting, we will be launching new modules each day of the meeting. For more information please visit: https://www.easd.org/annual-meeting.html
Watch out for our latest module, Hypoglycaemia in older people, launching on 26th July.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, Dr Eleanor D Kennedy.