Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Medical students are increasingly adept at utilising technology to enhance their learning, as previously described in our work on 'What is, This is' (WITI), a student-run question bank hosted on Instagram. 1 WITI leveraged the accessibility and convenience of social media to supplement formal classroom teaching by filling in knowledge gaps and supporting horizontal learning through peer question setting.However, as students progressed into clinical rotations, WITI's broad cross-disciplinary format became misaligned with evolving learning needs for clinically relevant content.This resulted in a new gap between WITI's original design, which was tailored for generalist content based on the preclinical curriculum, and the students' needs for specialty-specific content that directly supported their emerging professional interests and clinical competencies.2 | WHAT WAS TRIED?Students self-organised into Student Interest Groups (SIGs), each focused on different clinical specialties.The SIGs adapted WITI's peer-driven, social media-based model to operate within specialty silos that better matched clinical rotations, examination requirements and career interests.Remarkably, this evolution unfolded within just months, with individual SIGs achieving faster adoption and higher engagement than WITI's initial uptake.This migration reflected a fundamental shift in student preferences, from revision of classroombased content towards exploration of applied clinical knowledge.These changes occurred entirely without institutional mandate, formal curriculum restructuring, or coordination between SIGs, emerging instead from autonomous student initiative.Today, medical students across all years from our institution actively engage with SIGs, each maintaining more than 500 subscribers.The model's sustainability is built on practical foundations: social media provides a free, user-friendly platform with no running costs, where the essential work of question setting and fact-checking is distributed organically across the user community.1 Beyond the technical infrastructure, a decentralised governance structure where knowledge and practices flow from senior students to juniors within each SIG, granting them the autonomy to independently develop workflows, questions and content precisely tailored to their users' evolving needs.
Source: Medical Education
DOI: 10.1111/medu.70191
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7129036199