Collaborate
As a social constructivist learning activity, RheumMadness does not just seek to foster a community of learners, but also to stimulate collaborative knowledge creation within the community. Instead of asking participants to learn a predefined set of information, we provided a scaffold on which they could build the knowledge themselves.6 In RheumMadness, this scaffold was the bracket of teams included in the tournament.
The teams in the 2021 tournament were chosen by the RheumMadness Leadership Team with the intention of including rheumatology concepts that were novel, important, intriguing and would match up well with other concepts in the tournament. We also intentionally chose topics from diverse publication types in rheumatology, including clinical trials, translational studies, classification criteria and management guidelines.
The collaborative learning built on this scaffold began with scouting reports, reviewing each team in the tournament. These were collaboratively written by more than 40 fellows from 14 different adult rheumatology fellowship programs across the U.S. (see Table 1). We undertook extensive efforts to clearly and concisely explain the concept of RheumMadness and expectations for these reports via instructional videos, an example scouting report written by the RheumMadness Leadership Team and a blank template for generating scouting reports.
Table 1: Key RheumMadness Collaborators: adult rheumatology fellowship programs involved in scouting report creation and Blue Ribbon Panel members
| Fellowship Programs Involved in Scouting Report Creation |
|---|
| Allegheny Health Network |
| Duke University School of Medicine |
| Loma Linda University Health |
| Massachusetts General Hospital |
| Medical College of Wisconsin |
| Medical University of South Carolina |
| Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine |
| Ocshner Medical Center |
| University of Chicago |
| University of Colorado School of Medicine |
| University of Kentucky College of Medicine |
| University of North Carolina School of Medicine |
| Vanderbilt University School of Medicine |
| Wake Forest School of Medicine |
| Blue Ribbon Panel Members |
| Beth Jonas, MD, FACR, University of North Carolina |
| Eli Miloslavsky, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital |
| Jeffrey Sparks, MD, MMSc, Brigham and Women’s Hospital |
| Kristen Young, DO, UT Southwestern |
| Michael Putman, MD, MSCI, Medical College of Wisconsin |
| Tayseer Haroun, MD, Northern Virginia Center for Arthritis |
| Teresa Tarrant, MD, Duke University |
Five programs also participated in an hour-long bracketology session to help them plan their scouting report during the virtual Winter Carolinas Fellows Collaborative meeting in February 2021.
The scouting reports are the principle learning vehicles and the educational anchors of the RheumMadness tournament. They can be found on the RheumMadness website for any interested reader.7 The reports all follow the same basic structure:
- A brief overview of each topic;
- Current and potential future implications for patients, providers and researchers; and
- The chances of each topic winning in the first round and the tournament as a whole.
The reports are not just educational, they are fun to read and filled with basketball puns and rheumatology jokes. Readers can follow along with the fellows who wrote the scouting reports as they wrestle with concepts in new ways, trying to make sense of what the concepts mean and how they compare with other concepts in the tournament.
In March 2021, we posted the scouting reports to the RheumMadness website and encouraged participants to use the reports to learn about the teams in the tournament prior to submitting their own brackets. These reports generated 1,542 page views over three weeks, an average of 96 views per scouting report (data from Google Analytics). We also posted four podcast episodes containing audio versions of the scouting reports; these were downloaded 560 times, an average of 140 downloads per episode. As seen in Figure 3, the scouting reports were a major theme in Twitter conversations throughout the tournament, reflecting their central role in the educational initiative.
