Changing the Way Medical Students Learn: 4 Stories from Europe

(This presentation will take place in Tools of Change for Publishing 2010 conference in New York, 02/24/2010)

Healthcare change is on everyone’s agenda nowadays as the role of medicine in society changes. The focus has shifted from the occasional care of individuals in hospitals to promoting health in the community. These changes place new demands on doctors and have forced a rethink on how students are taught in medical school. Medical training is becoming more student-centered. There is an emphasis on active learning rather than on the passive absorption of knowledge. Rigid curricula are giving way to more adaptable and flexible ones.

Publishers of medical textbooks, like Elsevier, must take account of these changes. They must be equally adaptable and flexible in the way they deliver the information. They must understand how teachers teach and how students learn. We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to drive sustained innovation in medical education.
This presentation is based on our experiences in Europe. We will highlight four stories of medical students from the UK, Spain, France and Germany that illustrate how publishers are responding to the changing needs in medical education.

The stories will cover the following topics:

• How students collect information today in order to pass exams
• New exam testing tools
• Case-study exams
• Wiki-like collaborative lesson creation
• Dealing with piracy when moving from print to electronic delivery
• Sources of content: e-libraries & e-Books
• Delivering knowledge in small chunks

Products and services that will be covered:
UK: International Virtual Dental School
Spain: ArenaMIR
France: Université Médicale Virtuelle Francophone
Germany: Mediscript

This presentation is for anyone interested in how self-directed education changes the rules of the game for publishers. No medical knowledge required!

Google Wave: teaching online made easy?

I'm one of the persons who received a Google Wave account with eight invitations available in it. I was very interested -and excited- in discovering this new territory in the net. 

It was announced as a new collaborative tool, something between email, twitter and chat. But I didn't have a clear idea in my mind of what was his potential.

Now I've been playing with Google Wave, creating new waves, sharing contents, maps and files, making simple polls, chatting in real time and locating all his secrets.

While chatting with a colleague I realized the potential Google Wave has to teach. I was giving him some information in text format: a short paragraph of a new concept I am working on. He asked me some questions (more text) and then I sent them some images with comments so he could fully understand me idea. He then proposed minor changes and asked some more questions (more text). A YouTube video came to my mind, something from a parallel world that could help me to communicate better my project to him (movie). After the movie I decided to share with him a presentation I made to introduce my thoughts to other colleagues from other countries (PowerPoint). Finally I presented to him different sources (links to different sites), which inspired me to build the concept.

So that’s what we shared: text – questions – images + text – conversation – questions – video – slideshow – links

And another very key issue in that moment was my full control of the message and contents I was using to make him understand an idea. Just adding a test at the end of this path and I would have an online teaching object (and I could share it also with others).

So now, I would like Google Wave to fully deploy its potential (some areas are not ready to use yet) so I can discover more interesting usages for this new tool.

Color e-paper update - May 2009

An article published in Nature Photonics (read the summary of the article at http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v3/n5/abs/nphoton.2009.68.html) about a week ago informs about two prototypes of color e-paper displays. It is very interesting to see that the techonology they are using comes from the past. In fact, both developments are focused on using pigments in an aqueous solution inside the pixel. Then, by manipulating the voltage on each device the liquid with the pigment draws out from the reservoir into the freee space of the pixel (in the second prototype, there are two pigments in each reservoir but with different charge properties so that the voltage controls which of them is shown in the display). 

The potential of colorized e-ink for the health sciences publishing industry is huge. It opens a vast universe of possibilities and new developments on e-books and, also, new instructional models for education, e-libraries, multiformat services and more other interesting gadgets.

Fujitsu has started to sell his first color e-reader (FLEPia) on march this year, with an 8-inch screen display and up to 260,000 colors in high-definition. Even if it's a very good start for this new market, the re-draw speed is still low and the weight (385g) and specially the price is too high if compared to the Sony e-Reader or the Kindle. 

Medical images databases

I’m currently working with my team on browsing the images contained inside an ebook in a 3D environment. Tho objective is have a better navigation of the images and access the clinical cases from them. Doctors are used to see lots of images during their daily work, so it is important to navigate medical content databases the same way.

See this video I just made for better understand what we are doing:



Any comments and ideas are always welcome.