Developing effective pre-work material for flipped classrooms is an essential element of curricular design as medical schools incorporate more active learning opportunities into the curriculum. Although institutions have guidelines for the ratio of contact hours-to-prep work hours in active learning curricula, faculty still experience challenges in developing pre-work that are effective for student learning with appropriate time allocation and resource selection to maximize student learning. Therefore, we seek to develop a set of guidelines in developing best practices for effective preparation materials based on collaboration from both national and international institutions to share experiences and challenges.

To reach this goal, we presented a focus session at IAMSE 2025. We will share insights revealed from discussion, including thoughts on increasing student engagement during pre-work completion, standardizing estimation of time allocated for pre-work, generating learning objectives for prework, in addition to recommendations in selecting content and resources for vertical integration from foundational science to clinical thinking. We will then share results from our post-session survey asking attendees to describe a change they would like to make in pre-work design and barriers to this change following the session. Faculty described that they want to develop guidelines and strategies for best practices including student feedback and student motivation, and barriers to this change include time and resources. In a lightning talk, we would like to provide an update on this continued work, including preliminary best practice guidelines based on continued inter-institution faculty collaboration, and facilitate additional engagement from faculty in crafting high-impact preparation materials for flipped classroom sessions.