In the “classic” baseball movie Field of Dreams (I put “classic” in quotations because I know some of you will balk at the suggestion), James Earl Jones suggests to Kevin Costner that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. I will suggest to you, dear reader, that the one constant through all the years of CME programming we have had, is…how do I get people to respond to my dang surveys!?

OK, maybe I’m being a little facetious, but for as long as I have been working in CME (going on 15 years now), response rates to surveys has been a problem. We’re all constantly looking for new, cost-effective ways to get an increased number of people to complete our surveys, evaluations, etc. With that in mind, I’m really looking forward to Boyce Byerly’s 10:30 AM ET CMEpalooza session on Improving Response Rates on CME Surveys. Check out our “Sneak Peek” video with Boyce below for a nice summary of what he’ll be covering.

Side note: proving once again that I will never be a professional moderator, this video starts out a little abruptly as I forgot to tell everyone when we were going live and I had just finished shushing them when the video starts. As usual, I look like a doofus.

As everyone knows, the best way to convince someone to do something they may not want to do is to guilt them into it. And so, when I met Sara Miller at January’s Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions annual conference (at the bar, of course), it is possible that I may have casually said something like, “So, how is your abstract for CMEpalooza Spring coming along?” And Sara, who is apparently too nice, may have responded with something like “Uh, good, good. Just fine.”

Lo and behold, a week later, it was apparent that my strategy worked, as an abstract with Sara and her co-presenter Heather Guerrero from Gilead Sciences showed up. They will be presenting a session during CMEpalooza Spring entitled “Kwahl’i-tē im-prūv’mĕnt: You Can Say It, But Can You Do It?”

We recently caught up with Sara, who daylights as the Director of the QI Institute, CE Strategy and Content at Med-IQ, to talk about her upcoming session. Consider the video below as your guilt-free pleasure of the day.

Last week, Derek and I gave what I thought was a pretty successful series of presentations about CMEpalooza and our use of Google Hangouts On Air during the World Congress on Continuing Professional Development in San Diego.

We participated in one of the conference’s two “Innovation Lab Demonstrations” where session attendees were split into groups of approximately 10-15 individuals, rotating between each station for a 15-minute presentation.

Kudos to the conference organizers and especially Tym Peters from the University of California at San Francisco (our moderator and timekeeper) for being willing to try a new format and adapting between Day 1 and Day 2 to make a better experience for learners. Essentially, they turned the tables around so that each presenter didn’t have to raise his/her voice to be heard over the noise in the room – an easy fix, perhaps, but it made a big difference.

My rough estimate was that about half of the attendees had heard of and/or were familiar with CMEpalooza – not bad for an international audience. There were a variety of questions about our events and the potential use of Google Hangouts On Air (GHOA) for accredited educational activities. It was nice to see the wheels in the minds of some of our attendees churning as they thought about how to leverage the platform for their own purposes.

While there are certainly some nuances that take some getting used to as a regular moderator of the GHOA platform, both Derek and I have found it to be a very user-friendly platform that simply requires some experimenting and testing to master.

As part of our World Congress presentation, we developed a handout that walks through the basics of how to set up a GHOA session – basically, it’s your beginner’s guide. You can access the handout by clicking on this link. If you want to start tooling around, this should hopefully get you started. We’re always interested in hearing from others who are dipping their toe into the GHOA waters and answering any questions you have about it, so feel free to reach out to either of us if you really get stuck.