Residency Conference Credit

ALiEMU is one of the most popular free resources for emergency medicine (EM) residents to receive official residency conference credit in the United States, also known as Individualized Interactive Instruction (III) or asynchronous residency conference credit. During the period of 2015-2020, over 40,000 ALiEMU course certificates have been awarded.

Background

Educational institutions and organizations are increasingly awarding course completion credit and competency certificates for e-courses. Specifically, the Council of Residency Directors (CORD) in EM and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), have sought to broaden the types of educational experiences available to residents. Previous to 2008, five hours of synchronous educational conference time was required for U.S. EM residents per week for didactics. However, through recognition of the importance of asynchronous learning, the ACGME now (ACGME PDF) allows residencies to replace up to 20% of their traditional conference time with asynchronous learning outside the classroom. This asynchronous learning opportunity has been termed Individualized Interactive Instruction (III).

More specifically, to obtain III credit, the 4 below criteria must be met, which is inherent to the foundation of ALiEMU:

Item	III Criteria	ALiEMU Justification
1	The program director must monitor resident participation.	A Public Report page allows program leadership to track their residents’ progress. More granular or detailed reports can be requested by contacting us.
2	There must be an evaluation component.	At the conclusion of each block, there is a quiz to assess competency.
3	There must be faculty oversight.	Course instructors, who are automatically emailed whenever there is a new comment in the comments section of each block, reply in a timely fashion to the learner.
4	The activity must be monitored for effectiveness.	There is an ongoing, internal quality improvement process through peer review and analytics monitoring.