Eleven principles for teaching quality improvement virtually: Engaging with geographically distributed learners

Health care professionals in the United States are expected to engage in quality improvement (QI) as part of their daily practice. This has created the need for QI training at all levels of health professional education. A reported barrier to increasing QItrained health care professionals is the lack of QI-trained faculty at health care institutions and the limited availability of practitioners, given their daily clinical demands. E-learning is a potential solution. E-learning allows learning outside the traditional classroom setting, where instructors can flexibly deliver practical QI curricula to an interprofessional audience in multiple practice locations. The 11 principles presented in this article are derived from established evidence and experience and provide QI educators with practical principles for course design, implementation, and learner feedback of an e-learning course in QI.