Palliative Care Always as a massive open online course (MOOC) to build primary palliative care in a global audience.

123 Background: Primary palliative care (PC) is critical to improve access to PC from the point of diagnosis. Still, barriers exist to providing primary PC worldwide, including a lack of awareness, time, and training. Interactive online learning experiences can help overcome these. This project describes a massive open online course (MOOC)--Palliative Care Always--designed to build primary PC skills in a global audience. Methods: A team of PC providers and online instructional experts developed 12 modules that included: patient scenes, brief lectures, empathy exercises, and Google Hangout discussions. Course objectives included awareness of PC, practicing effective communication skills, basic symptom assessment and management. The target audience included oncology clinicians; secondary audience included patients and families. The MOOC launched January-April 2016. Participant engagement, satisfaction and self-reported knowledge were assessed through pre- and post-surveys. Multiple choice assessments captur...