Approved Instructional Resources Professional (AIR-Pro)

Welcome to the Approved Instructional Resources Professional (AIR-Pro) series! This series curates and grades open access blog posts and podcasts in the field of emergency medicine (EM) to identify high quality, social media-based, educational resources for senior EM residents. Unlike the AIR Series, this series targets more advanced practitioners and is no longer limited to content published within the previous 12 months. This series fulfills Individualized Interactive Instruction (III), or asynchronous online learning, conference needs. Below are the AIR-Pro blocks along with their suggested number of III conference hour credit. If you are a Program Director and wish to track your residents’ progress, please request Educator Dashboard access.

What is the AIR-Pro Series?

The AIR-Pro series was conceived by Dr. Fareen Zaver et al. to answer more advanced level concepts, while continuing to follow the AIR series model of providing a credible method to identify quality blogs and podcasts. The AIR-Pro series serves as a resource for U.S. EM residents to obtain Individualized Interactive Instruction (III) conference credit.

Why create the AIR-Pro Series?

We created this series because the AIR-Series has clearly filled a niche for III credit at over 80 U.S. EM residency programs. Many programs however still struggle to identify more appropriate content for more senior residents, beyond the AIR series content. Following Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development educational theory, this series provides more advanced content to help the senior resident stretch his/her knowledge base beyond foundational content.

To do this, we searched educational blogs and podcasts and included any date of publication unlike the AIR series which only search for the most recent posts on content.

How are the highest quality blog posts and podcasts identified?

For each major subject category, 5 EM Chief Residents from across the country propose 3-5 advanced clinical questions. Using FOAMsearch.net, an exhaustive comprehensive search is performed, finding all posts answering the clinical questions. These relevant posts are scored by 8 reviewers on the AIR-Pro Board, using a revised version of the AIR Series scoring instrument. The AIR-Pro scoring instrument includes five measurement outcomes, each using a Likert 7-point scale:

  • Recency
  • Content Accuracy
  • Educational Utility for the Senior Resident
  • Evidence Based Medicine
  • Referenced

How is the scoring different from the AIR Series?

There are 3 areas where the two series differ:

  1. On the scoring instrument, we replaced the Best Evidence in Emergency Medicine (BEEM) domain with Recency.
  2. The AIR-Pro series curates blogs and podcasts without a timeframe limit, unlike the AIR series which only includes posts within the previous 12 months. Based on our experience with the AIR Series, we observed that many high-quality, advanced-level blogs and podcasts were older than 12 months. AIR’s time cut-off was created partly to avoid impractically long lists of blog posts and podcasts to review each month. Because the AIR-Pro Series concentrates on very focused questions, we removed this timeframe cut off and instead just reward more recently published posts with a higher Recency score.
  3. On the scoring instrument, the Educational Utility domain specifically targets senior residents and not just residents in general in order to identify more advanced level educational content.

AIR vs AIR-Pro

What are the definitions of the AIR-Pro Approved and Honorable Mention labels?

There are two tiers of AIR labels. The “AIR-Approved” label is awarded to posts scoring ≥28 points (out of 35 total) on our AIR-Pro scoring instrument, which is slightly different from the AIR Series scoring instrument. To decrease the repetitive nature of posts relating to these advanced concepts, we did not always include every post found that met the score of ≥28 points. The “Honorable Mention” label is awarded to posts flagged and collectively recognized by Board members as worthwhile to highlight, despite the content scoring < 30 points. At a minimum, these need to have scored ≥26 points and still reflect accurate, appropriately referenced, and unbiased content. Quiz content is generated evaluating both AIR-Approved and Honorable Mention posts.