The rebel, the professor, and the entrepreneur: Qualitative study to explore creator stories of FOAM
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The free open access medical education (#FOAMed, or FOAM) movement creates educational content intended to inform medical education and clinical practice and is distributed in an unrestricted fashion (e.g., open access website). The who, what, and in particular the how of FOAM has raised important questions about the sustainability of the movement. Methods We recruited a diverse research team that included educational researchers, FOAM contributors, a business academician, and medical trainees to design and conduct a qualitative study exploring the work of FOAM creators. We analyzed the transcripts of interviews with 11 participants from top FOAM websites in emergency medicine and critical care. The team met frequently to iteratively identify and discuss emergent themes (major and minor) until saturation of concepts was achieved. Results Creators of FOAM could be categorized using three archetypes: the rebel, the professor, and the entrepreneur. The rebel was categorized as distinctly rejecting “traditional academic structures” yet was compelled to deliver educational content via alternative routes. The professor retained a traditional academic role, instead creating FOAM to supplement academic activities (teaching courses, disseminating scholarship, promotion). Entrepreneurs focused on creating a sustainable entity in an effort to supplement their income and reduce clinical obligations. Conclusion While all FOAM creators appear unified in their passion to create, promote, and distribute educational material with unfettered access to educators, their motivations for creating content could be differentiated. Given the grassroots nature of FOAM, creators share concerns related to financing, time commitments, and threats to sustainability of these businesses. The longevity of FOAM and what business models are best suited to support them are uncertain. Further exploration of the implications could investigate the best ways to engage with and support the different FOAM creator archetypes and develop models of sustainability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".