Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin has licensed Cochrane Interactive Learning campus-wide from December 2018. Since then, over 550 students and other Charité members have taken advantage of the opportunity to learn about PICOS, systematic search strategies, risk of bias, meta-analysis, GRADE, and the entire process of systematic reviews through flexible self-study units.
In a presentation to the 2021 AGMB conference, Jan Taubitz, Head of User Services at Charité Medical Library, discussed his experiences with the implementation and management of Cochrane Interactive Learning at Charité.
“The Medical Library of Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin has many requests from Charité members for face-to-face support with systematic literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews, meta-analyses and guidelines. These requests come from postgraduate scientists at Charité, but increasingly also from PhD students and MA students who wanted to write a systematic review as their final thesis and needed help with literature searches. Our goal with Cochrane Interactive Learning was to provide fast, low-threshold, and, most importantly, scalable help to enquirers in the form of an online learning service.
"Our goal with Cochrane Interactive Learning was to provide fast, low-threshold, and, most importantly, scalable help to enquirers in the form of an online learning service." Jan Taubitz, Head of User Services at Charité Medical Library
An important aspect for the success of CIL at the Charité was certainly the integration into the doctoral environment of the Charité. Since 2017, doctoral students at Charité have been required to complete courses that accompany their doctorate, which are intended to prepare them for later science-based employment. For example, 5 ECTS credit points must be completed for the Dr. med, and 30 credit points for a PhD. According to the internal accreditation of Cochrane Interactive Learning, 1.3 credit points can be completed after passing all 11 modules.
We are very pleased with the usage; we had 167 registered users in 2019 and then 321 users in 2020. The big increase is certainly due to the Corona restriction and the shift of teaching to digital formats. The intensity with which CIL is used is quite high; for example, in 2020, 135 of the 321 users completed and passed all modules.
CIL is certainly not a replacement for a library’s Systematic Review Service. Searching for Studies is just a single 90-minute module. This is certainly good news and bad news in equal measure; good news in that it does not make Information Specialists obsolete, bad news in that it does not replace time-consuming face-to-face consultations.
All in all, I am very happy that we were able to license Cochrane Interactive Learning at the Charité.”
