Background: The growing demand for podcasts as teaching tools for medical trainees provided the impetus for the creation of PsychEd, an educational psychiatry podcast developed by a group of psychiatry residents at the University of Toronto in 2015. Since its inception, PsychEd has evolved into a larger organization with members hailing from institutions across the country and a worldwide audience of over 2,500 regular subscribers. Beyond the direct educational benefits for listeners, participating in the organization through episode development, production, and engagement in research initiatives has positive impacts for those involved.

Goals or Intention: Examining the evolution of Psyched provides a unique opportunity to reflect on and characterize the theoretical foundations and practical aspects of a novel learner- and technology-driven medical education organization. This may inform future educational initiatives targeting medical learners.

Description of Project: This is a qualitative case study of the PsychEd organization. We will employ a constructivist and grounded theory approach to understand the inner workings of the organization in practical and theoretical terms as a means of identifying broader implications for medical education. We plan to conduct audits of organizational documents, interviews of key informants, and surveys of past and present PsychEd members to understand the organization’s educational impacts and factors that have contributed to this.

Impact/Issues so far: We are currently in the planning stages of the project. We anticipate having commenced our internal scan of the organization (including conducting interviews with members and initiating thematic analysis) and being able to present preliminary findings by the date of the conference.