The EHDEN Academy is a free, online educational resource for professionals in the domains of real world data (RWD) and real world evidence (RWE). Originating from the collaborative framework of the EHDEN project and supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2) joint undertaking, the EHDEN Academy operates on a global scale, currently engaging more than 5,350 active learners across 108 countries.
Its primary mission is to enhance the application and understanding of tools and methods that improve patient care not only across Europe but globally, through open science educational resources. Consequently, the EHDEN Academy serves as a crucial training node for the wider Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community, aligning with and directly contributing to their educational strategy.
The EHDEN Academy currently offers a curriculum consisting of 18 comprehensive courses and an additional six shorter courses, totaling 24 offerings. Courses are created by experts from the EHDEN and OHDSI communities who volunteer their knowledge and time. This decentralised approach ensures diverse and personal content, allowing every learner to find material suited to their interests and needs. It also aligns well with the collaborative nature of our platform and the open science community EHDEN is fostering.
As the EHDEN Academy continues to transition to the EHDEN Foundation, it is committed to extending its educational impact well beyond the initial five-year project term. Part of this development will be steps to enhance and expand the curriculum, guided by educational metrics and student feedback on the quality, variety, and format of the courses. While the decentralised approach to course development has been effective over the past couple of years, it has also presented challenges such as inconsistencies in course presentation and maintainability. We believe these issues are likely to become more pronounced as the platform grows, and to address them, a more centralised approach is necessary.
We are currently planning the introduction of an updated curriculum. Course development will follow a top-down approach, where key topics are first identified and courses are developed around these themes. To keep courses relevant, we are identifying themes of greatest importance to the EHDEN and OHDSI communities. We believe there needs to be emphasis on vocational excellence. Our methodology involves scraping job openings from organisations and institutions within the OHDSI and EHDEN networks to identify the most relevant job roles and their corresponding skill requirements. Based on these insights, we envision courses that refine the EHDEN Academy’s offerings, aligning them closely with the career ambitions of professionals in the healthcare, research, and informatics sectors— domains integral to OHDSI and EHDEN.
More feedback received from learners highlights the need for courses with different depths of content. In contrast to academic courses at a university, the workplace environment often demands varying levels of expertise across topics depending on the specific job roles. Such learning objectives are commonly categorised using Bloom's Taxonomy, which includes levels such as remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating. Unlike academic settings where comprehensive mastery across all levels is typically expected, professional roles may only necessitate proficiency in certain areas.
For example, managerial roles might require a strong foundation in the first two levels—remembering and understanding — to effectively grasp essential concepts and policies. Specialist roles may demand a focus on intermediate and advanced levels, like applying principles to real-world problems and analysing complex systems. Researchers tasked with driving innovation would extend their focus to evaluating existing methodologies and creating new theories or technologies. By customising courses to address these differentiated learning objectives within a single course framework, we can ensure that each learner engages with the material in a way that is most relevant to their specific job responsibilities.
As we look to the future, the EHDEN Academy remains committed to evolving its educational offerings to better serve the needs of our learners. Despite the new approach, we will continue to invite members of the EHDEN and OHDSI communities to contribute their insights and expertise. Your involvement will help us create a richer, more relevant educational experience in the field of real world data and real world evidence, to ultimately improve patient treatment and outcomes.
Henrik John
EHDEN Academy Lead
Scientific Researcher,
Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands