Pivoting a Campus-Wide Interprofessional All Professions Day into a Virtual Delivery Model: Lessons Learned

The COVID pandemic disrupted many long established interprofessional experiences that had been designed for traditional in-person delivery. When mandatory shutdowns began in April 2020, our campus IPE team was already in the midst of planning an in-person All Professions Day 1 (Fall 2020) and 2 (Spring 2021) that would each involve more than 1200 students and faculty from across three campuses. We decided to use our existing technology to produce these IPE events as planned. Immediate changes included identifying zoom capacities for our institutional licenses. That dictated the number of breakout rooms and supporting faculty we would need. We revised all faculty training materials to include the usual step by step information about each planned activity but also information on zoom etiquette, breakout rooms, sharing content, and other technological issues that might be unfamiliar for some faculty. The onboarding process of checking in via onsite iPads was modified to allow online check-in. Comparison of IPEC competency quiz results between the previous year’s in-person event and the virtual experience showed no changes in student performance on the IPEC core competency quiz scores. For both virtual and in-person experiences, more than 90% of students agreed or strongly agreed that they enjoyed meeting students from other colleges and professions and that they had a higher level of knowledge about the IPEC core competencies than they possessed prior to the events. After virtual APD 1, 56.26 strongly agreed or agreed that they preferred the virtual delivery method. By virtual APD 2, that percentage had increased to 57.34 %. For both APD 1 and 2, more than 20% of students reported no preference between methods. These results suggest that technology may offer a convenient, lower cost method of delivering IPE content without losing the essential educational and team-building aspects.