MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

Doing business at funerals is probably a major faux pas, but that’s where the inspiration for Medilectures began. It was a miserable day, cheered up only by retiring to the nearest local for a traditional tipple, or two.There I met a consultant from Imperial College medical school in London who told me about the nightmare his department was having setting up an undergraduate distance learning programme.

I am a broadcast journalist, so while all this was all very interesting, there
was little I could offer in the way of advice. Or so I thought. The more I
listened, the more I realised that there may be ways in which I could
offer some of my experience to help them out.

As a journalist I’d spent many years covering current affairs stories, but
more recently I’d been working in a consultancy role advising companies
on how best to communicate with their employees, stakeholders and
customers. It was work that took me across the country advising the CEOs
of companies as diverse as QinetiQ, BT, Whitbread and Network Rail.
But what I could offer medics at Imperial? It was time to take a look.

For some years Imperial had been relying on a system known as AVIT
which basically involves the live filming of a lecture in one university
location and transmitting it to another. Like many attempts at video
conferencing it wasn’t working that well, fewer students were turning up
to listen and the consultants were pretty disheartened. Many believed
that eLearning was the future, but no one was quite certain what is could offer and how it could be implemented. As a start, they had begun by taking old recordings of their AVIT lectures and uploading them, in their entirety, on-line. While the results were of some value they were not impressive.

Now I’d never heard of eLearning, I knew nothing about medicine and I
knew very little about education, but I did know a fair bit about communication and that, in a nutshell, was what needed to be focussed on at Imperial. Looking at the system in place, it was plain that it just didn’t engage with students - something the college was all too aware of. My
proposed solution was radical - why not bring the skills of broadcast journalism into the world of medical education? Let’s offer the students access to a BBC styled radio interview between the consultant and a
broadcast journalist. Furthermore, let’s record it in quality and edit it
like it would be back at the BBC. It was to be a bold step and needed the
backing of willing participants, but with some grant money it was time to
give it a go.

Working in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology division, we began with
An Introduction to HRT and the Menopause with Nick Panay, an expert in the field at Queen Charlotte’s hospital in north London. I went to visit him in advance of the recording and spent an afternoon familiarising myself with anatomy, osteoporosis, endometrial effects andother medical topics I knew nothing about. Some people have seen this as a flaw in our approach, but the opposite is in fact the case. Once prepped, an intelligent journalist can
offer an incredibly fresh examination of a topic without assuming too
much knowledge.

Two days later, after just a couple of hours of in-situ recording, the
interview was sitting in digital quality on my hard drive waiting to
be edited down. One week after that Nick was pretty taken back when he
received a 40 minute CD quality radio recording neatly divided into
subject tracks. All the stutters, retakes, umms and arrrs had been
deleted and we’d even removed the irritating sound of a hospital fan in
the background by applying one of our clever noise filters. The CDs
went out to the students and positive feedback came flying in.

The next stage was to progress from supplying the interview on audio
CDs to uploading it to the web. Imperial use WebCT, but as I was
learning to expect with these large institutions, it was taking too long to
negotiate uploading it, so we created our own password protected Imperial
lectures website.

Things moved quickly from then on. We accompanied subsequent
broadcasts with references to a handouts and we eventually
employed a software engineer to neatly combine the slides and audio
on the website together. But this was still not perfect. Ideally the slides
would come up as the consultant and interviewer discussed them and, even
better, they would be interactive. Moreover, why not add synchronised
video clips and follow each section with interactive audio and video
questions? That would be the Holy Grail of medical eLearning, but were
we asking too much?

After a month of testing a range of software and talking to developers we
decided to adopt a package from America which converts all the elements of our multimedia presentation into a one click Flash presentation. This software enabled us to ask interactive audio and video questions, which is something I saw as essential. And so Medilectures was on the road. The first lecture was followed with others and the feedback that came in from both students and the contributors continued to be superb.

Since our work with Imperial wehave been branching out and experimenting with other medical schools. Over the summer we worked closely with UEA and we are currently in discussions with Brighton and Sussex Medical School
about helping them develop new course content. Hospital teams have
also been contacting us for specific projects in which a professional touch is seen as essential.

In so many other fields technologyand learning are racing ahead together, but in the medical world there is very little buy-in for such innovative learning projects. Money is often quoted as the main barrier to progress - perhaps, but a far bigger hurdle is the inability of institutions
to work together, combined with the quite bizarre assumption that the
people who should be developing eLearning courses are generally the
medics themselves. A doctor wouldn’t expect me to diagnose an ailment of
his, equally I wouldn’t ask a doctor to produce cutting-edge audio and
video material. Our Medilectures work because all parties play to their
strengths. The medical teacher concentrates only on getting the key
subject messages across - not on the methods through which that is
achieved.

Everyone is going their own way. At eLearning conferences you will see
flag waving look at what we’ve been up to presentations, but little talk of
sharing, or developing content together. With some 320 NHS trusts
operating in this way it’s no wonder things aren’t going to well. The NHS
has, only in the past year, recognised they have a huge problem and formed the UK Alliance for eLearning in Health aimed at providing a database of eLearning resources www.nhselearningdatabse.org.uk.
That database will only be as good as the quality of the material submitted
to it, which from the vast amount of material I have viewed, is very poor.

Another thing people need to get their heads around is what eLearning
can and cannot offer the medical world. It is great for some things and
lousy for others - but few content developers are savvy enough to make
distinctions between the two. Let’s get things straight: medicine is one of
the most practical professions there is, so eLearning is always only going
to be one part of the jigsaw puzzle. It is not a substitute for hands-on
experience. It can however help reduce the learning curve. The Medilectures approach is that students will attend their practical sessions having first been empowered through an on-line introduction to the subject; at its best the learning curve is therefore reduced.

The future for Medilectures is in delivering audio and video medical
content on hand-held devices. We are in talks at present about how this
could best work, but (and you can have this information for free) the
future lies in mobile phones. All the students of tomorrow will be
banking, shopping and yes- learning about medicine - through their
mobiles, they’ll rarely be sitting at a networked PC in the library.

Our approach to eLearning is that, if you deliver important course
material over the internet, do it properly. The students of the future
have little inclination for poor quality material, so it makes sense to
put some time, effort and - yes - financial resources, in to enhanced
production values. If you do the results can be outstanding and they
will last. That’s what investment is all about.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In workshops over the
summer over 90% of focus group students testing the new Medilectures interface thought it was excellent. In terms of learner satisfaction that’s high praise indeed. And every lecturer we’ve worked with as given positive feedback about their interviews. With some more positive thinking we may be able to turn the tide on this.

There is an online demo available at www.medilectures.com/demo/player.html