RheumMadness: Creating an Online Community of Inquiry in Rheumatology.

Objective: To evaluate the educational impact of RheumMadness, an online tournament of rheumatology concepts grounded in social constructivist theory, as viewed through the community of inquiry (CoI) framework.

Methods: The curricular scaffold of RheumMadness was a bracket of 16 rheumatology concepts competing as "teams" in a tournament. Participants could create and review "scouting reports" about each team, listen to a RheumMadness podcast, discuss on social media, and submit a bracket predicting tournament outcomes according to the perceived importance of each team. Engagement was measured with direct analytics and through self-report on a survey. The survey also assessed participants' educational experience using an adapted 34-item CoI survey, which describes the cognitive, social, and teaching presences in a learning activity.

Results: One hundred brackets were submitted. On average, each scouting report was viewed 92 times, each podcast episode was downloaded 163 times, and 486 tweets were sent about #RheumMadness from 105 users. The survey received 58 of 107 responses (54%). Respondent agreement with prompts related to each CoI presence was: 70.3% cognitive, 61.7% social, 84.9% teaching. Reported engagement in RheumMadness correlated strongly with overall CoI survey scores (r = 0.72, P < 0.001).

Conclusion: RheumMadness created an online CoI that fostered social constructivist learning about rheumatology.