The world-wide pandemic of 2020 forced a dramatic and expedited evolution of TBL to an online environment. While platforms for online TBL delivery were commercially available at that time, often institutions and companies without the significant budget for additional costly software licenses found ourselves lagging behind and in need of a solution. We at the University of Toledo Department of Medical Education found ourselves in this position – needing to switch an entire TBL delivery system for multiple classes of 175 student online within weeks and with no additional funds. As director of multiple medical school courses, and in response to this challenge, I and my colleagues designed and have since refined an innovative delivery platform using software readily available to most educators, Microsoft 365 and associated apps.

Originally centered around MS Teams as an online synchronous modality with breakout rooms for discussion, our system has evolved into an in-person, web-based delivery platform that allows for rapid and on demand content creation and modification from existing materials, electronic scratch off cards, online grade submission, question requests, and appeals submission. Using the Microsoft 365 platform, we created a student peer- and faculty feedback system which effectively automated greater than 1,300 student emails with individual and unique feedback per session.

In this workshop, we will demonstrate this automated system and provide guidance and hands on activities for workshop participants to begin to set up their own in-house web-based system at their institution. The advantages of the TBL web-based delivery system include cost and time savings to faculty and support staff to deliver TBL, ease in formatting content, and streamlining large class facilitation.

One limitation is that while the tools needed to build this system require little/minimal coding experience, the apps used may be less than familiar to laypeople than typical Microsoft Office packages.