We are updating the system behind the course; the test questions' database, as well as the content of some of the presentations. We hope this won't lead to any downtime.

Thank you for your patience!

The Social MEDia Course, a series of digital lectures about medicine and social media with tests and gamification, has been a success story since its launch this April and based on the requests from users, we are now happy to introduce new, community-driven features. The reason? Because we believe we can solve problems by learning together.



1) Submit a Question for the Tests!

Users have been sending us amazingly creative questions for the tests which you can take after finishing a lecture, therefore we thought we should let them submit their own questions and let the community decide which questions are suitable for being added to the database of questions. This way the tests will become even more challenging.

2) Crowdsource a Challenge!

We believe challenges related to the medical use of social media can be solved together. If you want to launch a Youtube channel for your practice or start a Twitter account for medical purposes, but do not know how, let's work it out together as a learning community. Submit the challenge you have to face while using social media for medical purposes and let the community find a solution for that.

We hope you will like these features so then we can prove that learning together is the best solution even in social media and medicine.

As we are in beta version now, we cannot wait to hear your feedback!

I designed and launched The Social MEDia Course for those medical students and professionals who would like to know more about e-patients, social media-related issues and lifehacks for their professional lives. Over 500 users have been working on the lectures, doing the tests and we had to wait 6 weeks to find the first one who could pass all the tests and achieve the "The Ultimate Expert" badge. I had a pleasure to do an interview with Miguel Angel Mayer.

• Why did you decide to take all the tests? Do you have any experience with social media?

After seeing two of the courses I saw that the content and the information provided were very interesting and I decided to go on with all the courses and thought why not take all the tests to check my level. My experience with social media is wide and varied because many years ago, in 2007, I was very interested in these issues and I introduced Family Doctors in Web 2.0 tools and services for the first time here. Since then I have been giving conferences and introducing the use of Web 2.0 tools even in the Medical School since 2008.

• Was it hard to complete any of the tests?

I didn’t see differences in completing the tests; more or less the difficulty was the same, although the first attempts were more difficult because of the mechanics in doing them. In my view some numerical information is not too relevant to memorize and to ask about.

• Which prezi was your favorite one and why?

In fact I had more than one favourite, in concrete the prezis related to e-Patients, Education 2.0 and Medical Communities were my favourites. I think the resources and the videos were very interesting.

• How much time did it take all together to finish the course?

Really I don’t know exactly but taking into account I was the first one to finish it not too much I suppose.

• Do you have any suggestions about improving the course?

In my view some information could be difficult to follow thinking of students or people not too familiar with Web 2.0, so sometimes a little more text explanation or some information in voice format accompanying the text may be of help.

• Do you think this course is suitable for introducing medical students and professionals to digital literacy?

Yes, I think the course is useful and interesting to introduce medical students and professionals to issues related to the use of social media and web 2.0 tools, providing a general view with very good details, besides some interesting concepts about information management. My congratulations on the course.

Here is his certificate which he received in the original PDF format:

I co-authord a recent MedPage Today article about social media and medical education with Dr. George Lundberg. Check it out here!

Medical education and medical practice at all levels, already online in so many ways, can no longer remain aloof from social media.

When patients ask questions about the online world, or more precisely about social media, medical professionals should at least be aware of the issues and be able to give an honest, nondefensive, appropriate answer without hesitation.

After a presentation about this course at the Medicine 2.0 Congress at Stanford University in November 2011, a U.K. physician asked permission to travel to Debrecen, Hungary, every week during the semester just to attend the course. So, Dr. Mesko developed and launched a new global format called The Social MEDia Course.

The world's first free, curriculum-based, social media course for medical students was just launched a few days ago. The Social MEDia Course offers 16 important topics with post-tests and some gamification. Let's see what kind of badges you can earn while becoming social media-savvy from the medical perspective. The number of available badges is growing!