LAUSR

Medical education is increasingly informed by modern theories of adult learning, which argue that adults benefit from educational experiences that are self-directed, born from the learner’s own goals, draw upon adults’ unique lived experiences, and apply immediately relevant information [1]. As such, educators are developing curricula that expand past the traditional lecture format and utilize alternate formats such as flipped classrooms or team-based learning sessions [2]. Additionally, educators are incorporating new technology and social media into teaching with the goal of appealing to increasingly tech-savvy “digital native” students and creating more collaborative, effective, and efficient learning sessions [3]. However, medical educators who have historically utilized traditional lecture-based teaching may experience barriers to integrating multimedia into teaching sessions, such as unfamiliarity with which multimedia resources to use or how to best integrate them into their teaching. In this article, we will demonstrate how narrative podcasts (brief, freely available, and easily accessible audio files with a storyline) can be used as powerful educational tools. We will discuss specific examples of how to incorporate podcasts into a lesson plan and provide a curated list of podcast episodes that can serve as useful teaching tools in order to help educators develop modernized curricula to teach psychiatric concepts to twenty-first century medical students and residents. Why Podcasts?