I have been running the Clinical Biomechanics Boot Camps for years. The feed back has been awesome and has changed a lot of peoples clinical practice which is the most satisfying for me. The content of these continues to evolve and new stuff is constantly being added and old stuff deleted. The context changes and the course adapts. It has now reached the stage that I was getting concerned about the amount I was deleting and I was exploring options to make that older, but still good and useful, content available. I was also starting to find it more difficult to meet all the requests for them in each area and finding it harder to be away from home so much. The solution was to offer it online with substantially expanded content, allowing me to go into greater depth with the content rather than be restrained by the two days that I typically had.
Over time, due to my involvement in debates on Podiatry Arena; writing my blogs on critical thinking about the research and debunking myths (Running Research Junkie and Its a Foot Captain, But Not as You Know It) led me to more aspects of critical thinking, logical fallacies and the way to translate research into clinical practice being incorporated into the Clinical Biomechanics Boot Camps. It also led me on adventures in social media outside my primary area of expertise, fighting and debunking pseudoscience, woo, quackery and nonsense whenever and wherever it rared its head (ie vaccines, GMO’s, chemtrails, medical advice on Facebook, etc) and to further appreciate the role that science plays not only in our own clinical practice, but also in being a good citizen of this planet. Rather than add more of this to the Clinical Biomechanics Boot Camp course, I have spun that off into the course on how to Become a Skeptical and Critical Thinking Podiatrist. The content is fun, wide ranging and will make you a better clinician, thinker, consumer of research, theory and ideas and a better citizen of the planet. This course is not what you would cover in a research methods course at University; but this is the course that I think should be the research methods that you do at University.
Over time, more of the new content in the Clinical Biomechanics Boot Camps was focusing on ‘running’ as that is where so much was happening that was influencing changes in clinical practice, even in non-running related topics. It was growing as a proportion of the Boot Camps content and I was starting to get a little uncomfortable with that. So I have spun off the running shoe content and substantially expanded it into a very in-depth course on Becoming a Running Shoe Guru. You will be a real expert at the end of that course.
That is how all this started. The content is being made available online and more courses will come in the future. The content for each course is divided up into 30-40 minute chunks so they can completed in one session at a time. They are not just a boring recorded PowerPoints with audio – they consist not only of the PowerPoint but have talking heads, demos, interactions with comments from other experts. That is what excites me the most as I can develop content further and include other experts. Rather than talk about them and paraphrase them, I have included them! At the bottom of each 30-40 minute chunk of content is a Q & A forum for questions. The questions and answers are there for everyone to see! After each Clinical Biomechanics Boot Camp I used to get emails with questions. It always troubled me that my replies only went to the one person and not everyone who was there. This Q & A solves that problem. The delivery of all the courses are based on the current principles of adult learning theory and research and latest best practice in eLearning. Your learning is supported and once you enroll you are not left to your own to work through the content.
The other big plus of doing it this way is that you will have lifelong access to the course, so whenever I update any content or add content, you will get access to that. You will get access to the Q & A’s forever as more questions get asked and answered. Additionally, all learners are supported in a private Facebook group.
And of course, answer some multi-choice questions at the end and out comes a certificate.