Free Open Access Meducation, or FOAM—medical learning materials available online without a paywall—grew rapidly in emergency medicine and critical care. Blogs (websites built around written posts) and podcasts expanded from two blogs and one podcast in 2002 to 141 blogs and 42 podcasts in 2013, a trajectory documented prospectively by Cadogan and colleagues [1]. That history established the scale of a new educational movement, but scale is not the same as educational value. The harder questions are how learners use these resources, how they judge which voices are credible, and whether listening or reading changes practice or patient care. This article follows FOAM’s shift from documenting a new medium to examining its use, trustworthiness, and impact—and the research still needed to understand it.
The featured paper provides the field’s baseline map. Rather than examining a single podcast or blog, Cadogan and colleagues prospectively gathered data on emergency medicine and critical care (EMCC) blogs and podcasts from 2002 through November 2013. “Prospectively” means that the resources were tracked as the period unfolded, creating a record of the movement’s development rather than relying only on a later snapshot. [1]
The paper’s central result is a striking increase in the number of EMCC websites: the dataset grew from two blogs and one podcast in 2002 to 141 blogs and 42 podcasts in 2013. A blog is a website organized around written posts; a podcast is an audio program distributed online. Together, these formats represented a rapidly expanding set of educational outlets outside traditional paywalled publishing. [1]
Its importance lies less in comparing one resource with another than in making the scale of the new ecosystem visible. The authors describe this as an “explosive” expansion and position the dataset as a foundation for future research in the field. [1] That framing matters: before researchers can ask how learners use FOAM, how they assess its credibility, or whether it affects education and practice, they need to know what resources exist and how the landscape has changed. This paper therefore serves as a seed study—not because it resolves FOAM’s educational value, but because it establishes the growth that made those subsequent questions possible.
The growth documented by Cadogan prompted a second wave of research asking not only what resources existed, but how they were used. In a Canadian survey, residents reported extensive use of free online educational resources for general emergency medicine, procedural skills, and diagnostic-test interpretation; podcasts were among the most frequently used formats. Residents and program directors differed in their views of entertainment value and the importance of literature references, although both groups reported reading more peer-reviewed literature when using these resources .