2014, 36: 365–369
And finally. . .
News & Notes
Effective 24 February, the AMEE Office will be installed in its new premises. Whilst still based at the University of Dundee, AMEE is moving to a newly-renovated property which will provide excellent accommodation for its rapidly growing activities. The new address is: AMEE, 12 Airlie Place, Dundee DD1 4HJ, UK. The phone, fax, email and website remain as at present: tel: þ44 (0)1382 381953; fax: þ44 (0)1382 381987; email: [email protected]; web: www.amee.org
16th Ottawa Conference/ 12th Canadian Conference on Medical Education: Transforming Healthcare through Excellence in Assessment and Evaluation Registration for the Conjoint 16th Ottawa Conference/12th Canadian Conference on Medical Education is open on http:// www.mededconference.ca/ccme2014/registration.php The Preliminary Program is also available by following the link. The program is fully integrated with common plenary sessions and all registrants may attend any of the sessions. One speaker in each plenary will focus on a teaching/learning topic and the second will address an assessment topic. Two tracks will also run throughout the simultaneous sessions. For full details see www.ottawaconference.org or http://www.mededconference.ca The early registration deadline ends on 15 March.
ISSN 0142-159X print/ISSN 1466-187X online/14/40365–5 ß 2014 Informa UK Ltd. DOI: 10.3109/0142159X.2014.896501
Social Media Boot Camp: Everything you wanted to know about social media but were afraid to ask your students - PreConference Workshop, CCME/ Ottawa Conference, Ottawa, Friday April 25, 2014 Don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet and exchange ideas in person with the innovative network of medical educators who are dedicated to fostering communication, collaboration, and new learning opportunities through social media. This is a key faculty development opportunity whether you are an early adopter or tentative observer of social media. This half day workshop at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME) will be led by an international panel of experts: Dr. Anne Marie Cunningham (UK), Dr. Alireza Jalali (Canada), Mrs. Natalie Lafferty (UK), Dr. Neil Mehta (USA), and Ms. Catherine Peirce (Canada). Sign up for this workshop when you register for CCME 2014. http://www.mededconference.ca
AMEE 2014 Thanks to everyone for submitting abstracts for AMEE 2014. Abstracts are out for review and decisions will be announced by 16 April. The early registration deadline is 17 May. The AMEE 2014 Conference will be held in Milan, Italy, from 30 August to 3 September and the provisional programme is available on www.amee.org
20 14
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
The AMEE Office is moving!
365
And finally. . .
Surgery 101
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
ICYMI – The Surgery 101 podcast series has been downloaded over 1 million times in 175 countries. The series, launched in 2010, is intended to help medical students learn about surgical basics. Creators Dr. Boora and Dr. White, with the support of the Department of Surgery at the University of Alberta, continue to release new podcasts on a regular basis. This year Surgery101 has a summer intern program in which a small, collaborative team of creative, self-directed students will have an opportunity to shoot, edit and produce videos for the series. The podcasts can be accessed through iTunes or the Surgery 101 app for iPhone and iPad. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/surgery-101/id293184847 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/surgery-101/id390445770?mt¼8
Completion rates for Medical MOOCs A Massively Open Online Course form the Perelman School of Medicine saw the highest completion rate of MOOCs offered by University of Pennsylvania, according to a recent study. Cardiac Arrest, Hypothermia, and Resuscitation Science, a course exploring breakthroughs in the treatment of patients during cardiac arrest and after successful resuscitation, saw completion rates of 14%, far higher than the 4% average of all University of Pennsylvania MOOCs offered on the Coursera platform. With a 6 week duration it was also the shortest course in the study; other courses ranged in duration from 7 to 14 weeks. The study from University of Pennsylvania also
found that courses with lower student workloads and fewer homework assignments had somewhat higher completion rates on average. For more information, see: http://bit.ly/ 1cCYjvA
Benefits of the Flipped Classroom A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study found that students enrolled in their Basic Pharmaceutics II course much preferred the flipped version of the course and got better grades on the final examination. Educators in the flipped classroom course offloaded all lectures to self-paced online videos and used class time to engage students in active learning exercises, including in-class quizzes using audience response, small group discussion, student presentations, and paper-based quizzes, and microlectures of one to three minutes. The study results were published online in Academic Medicine: http://bit.ly/ 1bT9YFw
eLearning News Valerie Smothers from MedBiquitous in the US has been an enthusiastic Editor of the eLearning News feature over the past four years. She now has new responsibilities and is stepping down as Editor. We are very grateful to Valerie and her Contributors for their help over the years in putting together this very successful feature.
Do You Know? Contributor to this issue: R M Harden
Question 1 Given the calls for earlier student engagement in clinical experience, in what patient care activities can pre-clinical medical students legitimately participate?
character chunks. The messages often link to full-length articles or photos by including a URL. How can Twitter be used to enhance academic practice?
Question 4 Question 2 In problem-based learning (PBL) students play a key role. What are the four steps to success for a student in PBL?
Question 3 The online social media platform Twitter enables people to connect and communicate in short one hundred and forty 366
Student engagement in the university or medical school is now expected. In the ASPIRE-to-excellence initiative the engagement of students in the medical school and in the curriculum is one of the three areas where schools can be recognised for excellence. Students are partners in the learning process rather than simply consumers of an educational product. How can students be meaningfully engaged in the curriculum?
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
And finally. . .
Answer 1
Answer 3
In the USA, the student run clinic (SRC) is a common clinical entity that routinely relies on pre-clerkship medical students to provide direct patient care services under the supervision of licensed volunteer doctors. Chen and co-workers at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine conducted interviews with a sample of medical student and faculty volunteers. (Medical Education, 2014: 48; 136–145). They found that early medical students were capable of participating in patient care experiences that are typically reserved for more advanced learners and can engage to an extent not available to them in the core curriculum. Normally in an education programme clinical workplaces address risk by denying students opportunities to participate rather than by developing graded student responsibilities with appropriate supports. SRCs in contrast invite student participation and address risk by providing narrowly focussed responsibilities within a highly structured environment. The limited scopes of practice and access to focused training and support serve to grade student responsibilities, thereby affording pre-clerkship students opportunities to engage at the depth required for legitimate participation.
Beckingham and Adams, writing in Educational Developments (2013: 14; 10–13) describe how Twitter is becoming a ubiquitous force in educational development. They describe how it can be used in a number of ways for scholarly purposes. Twitter can help the teacher to keep abreast of new articles, trends and developments in higher education. Educational developers and researchers can also use Twitter to ask for ideas, input and support. Twitter can also be used by students to share information or to raise questions during a lecture, with a running stream of tweets shown on a screen for the lecturer to respond to. Students can be asked to tweet key points from a lecture and these can then be collated and viewed using tools such as ‘Storify’ to share the collection of tweets in a storyline or newspaper layout. Further information is available where 24 printable cards provide key tips to anyone wanting to get started with Twitter: http://www.slideshare.net/suebeckingham/getting-startedwith-twitter-23557615
Answer 2 Bate and Taylor describe in 12 tips on how to survive PBL as a medical student (Medical Teacher, 2013: 35; 95–100) the four steps to success for a student in PBL: understand why PBL is used; be aware of the group dynamics; learn how to collaborate with others; build social networks. This is discussed further in the AMEE Guide on the topic – Problem-based learning (PBL): Getting the most out of your students – their roles and responsibilities (Medical Teacher, 2014: 36; 1–12). Bate and co-workers describe how PBL is a learning process that requires students to be actively involved in collaborative group work with students taking responsibility for their learning. They argue that the key to a successful outcome (achieving educational objectives) is for students and faculty to understand the process of learning and their role in it. This is described in the Guide.
Answer 4 Carey writing in Innovations in Education and Teaching International (2013: 50; 250–260) studied students experience of participation in curriculum design. There is a need to switch from a complaints culture to encouraging students to offer solutions to problems. Feedback-on-feedback needs to be provided signalling to students that their voice is being heard and valued. Finally the foundation of student-friendly systems of engagement alleviates the power imbalance between students and the institution. This can include encouraging a more equal student staff ratio in meetings. Carey argues that there is little value in waiting until the curriculum needs an overhaul before involving students. The staff student partnership should not be a one off exchange but an ongoing process that characterises the whole student experience. It is argued that engagement is not simply about systems and procedures alone. An engagement culture needs to happen inside as well as outside the classroom to become a distinguishing feature of the learning and assessment strategy.
367
And finally. . .
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
Jottings by Saquarrah
In an editorial in Fundacio´n Educacio´n Me´dica (FEM, 2013: 16(4); 186–189) Gual et al argue that while progress has been made since the Edinburgh Declaration produced at the World Conference on Medical Education in 1988, we have come only a short way along the path to meeting the objectives. They write ‘Our education system, and more specifically the part of training that falls under the responsibility of universities, has again missed the opportunity to carry out real changes and has limited itself to making just superficial alterations. We have been more concerned with getting lots of things done instead of doing them well.’ It is interesting to revisit, as set out in the article, the major recommendations of the Edinburgh Declaration – introducing community-based learning, ensuring that curriculum content reflects health care priorities, promoting self-directed learning and life-long learning, synchronising the curriculum and assessment systems to achieve professional competence, training teachers as educators, addressing disease prevention and health promotion in the curriculum, integrating clinical practice into basic training and selecting candidates for medical studies on the basis of their personal qualities rather than their intellectual capabilities.
Textbooks have been seen as becoming increasingly obsolete. Friesen takes a contrary view and in an article in Educational Researcher (2013, 42(9); 498–508) proposes the textbook as an evolving pedagogical form and as a changing medium comprised of smaller media components. These components include images, diagrams and also oral prompts. Friesen talks about the metamorphosis of textual print material into a lively activity, a thinking-aloud and a self-explanation.
Kathy Kristof, an award winning financial journalist writes in Moneywatch (September 10, 2013) $1 million mistake: Becoming a doctor. She suggests that in the USA most doctors are dissatisfied with the job and less than half would choose a career in medicine if they were able to do it over again. One problem, it is claimed, is the increasing paperwork and administrative tasks which now account for nearly one quarter of a doctor’s day. The cost of becoming a doctor in the USA soared leaving the average newly qualified doctor with $166,750 in debt, while at the same time average salaries are declining. She argues that with the 11–14 year of higher education required to become a physician, the typical doctor does not earn a full-time salary until 10 years after the typical college graduate starts making money. With the cost of this lost decade of work and the time and cost it takes to pay off medical school debt ‘a dissatisfied physician may well consider pursuing medicine as a $1 million mistake.’ It is reported that across all specialities, physicians see roughly 13 patients per 368
day, work 52 hours per week and earn an average of $270,000 per year.
To be successful at work it helps to be aware of the people you are dealing with, suggests Jane Clarke in her book Savvy: Dealing with People, Power and Politics at Work. ‘Stars’ have all the skills needed to operate well in the work environment. ‘Naives’ have their hearts in the right place, they may be thought of as irritants, incompetents or innocents. ‘Machiavellian types’ are underhand but skilled at getting what they want. They are often highly controlling, ‘Barbarians’ are as subtle as a bull in a china shop. They are out for themselves and won’t think twice about stabbing others in the back. It is interesting how this might play out in medical education, for example in the transition to an integrated curriculum where one department is notoriously uncooperative. ‘Stars’ might set up a meeting to work through how best to collaborate. ‘Naives’ might email to staff in the department giving them some frank feedback and asking them to collaborate. ‘Machiavellians’ would talk to the Dean, listing the department’s failings and ask them to intervene. ‘Barbarians’ would make sure people in the faculty know how uncooperative the department is and tell them to complain.
The provision of students each day with one or two multiple choice questions and immediate feedback during a course led to greater self-confidence, enthusiasm and performance in the end of course test (Tanck et al, Perspect Med Educ, 2014: 3: 4–14). The questions were sent via email and were of increasing difficulty as the course progressed.
What determines the climate in an academic organisation was the subject of a study by McMurray in the Higher Education Research & Development (2013: 32(6); 960–974). A good organisational climate has been shown to be important for academic staff. McMurray and Scott found that for academic staff in a university environment, the aspects of their work environment that affects their feelings about the climate of their organisation is, firstly, support and this area should be targeted by university management seeking to improve the climate of their organisation and, hence, the performance of the academic staff. The second most important group of measures are those of trust and fairness, while the third group is innovation and recognition.
The University of London has published a report on their Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
And finally. . .
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
(www.londoninternational.ac.uk). Four MOOCs were offered in June 2013 each lasting six weeks and designed to provide a short introduction to subjects offered as full degrees. These attracted over 210,000 initial registrations, over 90,000 active students in their first week from over 160 countries and lead to 8843 Statements of Accomplishment being attained. Over 30 students who applied to one of the 2013/2014 fee paying programmes indicated that they took one of the MOOCs beforehand. The report discusses the range of styles and learning methods adopted by the four MOOCs and highlights key points for consideration in the development of resources for future MOOCs.
Uncovering innovations that are invisible in plain sight was the subject of an article in Phi Delta Kappan (2013, 95: 28–33) by Arvind Singhal. He argues that to discover important innovative practices that may otherwise be ignored, attention should be paid to positive deviants. These are individuals who face the same challenges as others and have the same resources but still manage to find ways to effectively address problems. He gives an example of a study of child malnutrition in an area south of Hanoi. While the instance of malnutrition was high there were some children from very poor families
who were well-nourished. Those who managed to avoid malnutrition without access to any special resources were the positive deviants. It was found that the families of these children were practising a few simple behaviours that others were not. For example, families collected tiny shrimps and crabs and added them to their children’s meals. Families were feeding their children smaller meals three to four times a day rather than the customary large two a day and families were feeding the children rather than placing food in front of them, making sure no food was wasted. Perhaps we need to study more positive deviants in medical education.
Randomised trials of specific professional development programmes have not enhanced our knowledge of effective faculty development programme characteristics, leaving us without guidance with regard to best practices, suggests Hill et al (Educational Researcher, 2013: 42(9); 476–487). They suggest it is too early to tell why the results of randomised trials contradict conventional wisdom among researchers in this field, the reason they argue may be that the content of specific programmes evaluated may have been ineffectual, while programmes may have deviated from best practices in important ways due to poor implementation.sss
369
And finally. . .
News & Notes
Effective 24 February, the AMEE Office will be installed in its new premises. Whilst still based at the University of Dundee, AMEE is moving to a newly-renovated property which will provide excellent accommodation for its rapidly growing activities. The new address is: AMEE, 12 Airlie Place, Dundee DD1 4HJ, UK. The phone, fax, email and website remain as at present: tel: þ44 (0)1382 381953; fax: þ44 (0)1382 381987; email: [email protected]; web: www.amee.org
16th Ottawa Conference/ 12th Canadian Conference on Medical Education: Transforming Healthcare through Excellence in Assessment and Evaluation Registration for the Conjoint 16th Ottawa Conference/12th Canadian Conference on Medical Education is open on http:// www.mededconference.ca/ccme2014/registration.php The Preliminary Program is also available by following the link. The program is fully integrated with common plenary sessions and all registrants may attend any of the sessions. One speaker in each plenary will focus on a teaching/learning topic and the second will address an assessment topic. Two tracks will also run throughout the simultaneous sessions. For full details see www.ottawaconference.org or http://www.mededconference.ca The early registration deadline ends on 15 March.
ISSN 0142-159X print/ISSN 1466-187X online/14/40365–5 ß 2014 Informa UK Ltd. DOI: 10.3109/0142159X.2014.896501
Social Media Boot Camp: Everything you wanted to know about social media but were afraid to ask your students - PreConference Workshop, CCME/ Ottawa Conference, Ottawa, Friday April 25, 2014 Don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet and exchange ideas in person with the innovative network of medical educators who are dedicated to fostering communication, collaboration, and new learning opportunities through social media. This is a key faculty development opportunity whether you are an early adopter or tentative observer of social media. This half day workshop at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME) will be led by an international panel of experts: Dr. Anne Marie Cunningham (UK), Dr. Alireza Jalali (Canada), Mrs. Natalie Lafferty (UK), Dr. Neil Mehta (USA), and Ms. Catherine Peirce (Canada). Sign up for this workshop when you register for CCME 2014. http://www.mededconference.ca
AMEE 2014 Thanks to everyone for submitting abstracts for AMEE 2014. Abstracts are out for review and decisions will be announced by 16 April. The early registration deadline is 17 May. The AMEE 2014 Conference will be held in Milan, Italy, from 30 August to 3 September and the provisional programme is available on www.amee.org
20 14
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
The AMEE Office is moving!
365
And finally. . .
Surgery 101
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
ICYMI – The Surgery 101 podcast series has been downloaded over 1 million times in 175 countries. The series, launched in 2010, is intended to help medical students learn about surgical basics. Creators Dr. Boora and Dr. White, with the support of the Department of Surgery at the University of Alberta, continue to release new podcasts on a regular basis. This year Surgery101 has a summer intern program in which a small, collaborative team of creative, self-directed students will have an opportunity to shoot, edit and produce videos for the series. The podcasts can be accessed through iTunes or the Surgery 101 app for iPhone and iPad. https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/surgery-101/id293184847 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/surgery-101/id390445770?mt¼8
Completion rates for Medical MOOCs A Massively Open Online Course form the Perelman School of Medicine saw the highest completion rate of MOOCs offered by University of Pennsylvania, according to a recent study. Cardiac Arrest, Hypothermia, and Resuscitation Science, a course exploring breakthroughs in the treatment of patients during cardiac arrest and after successful resuscitation, saw completion rates of 14%, far higher than the 4% average of all University of Pennsylvania MOOCs offered on the Coursera platform. With a 6 week duration it was also the shortest course in the study; other courses ranged in duration from 7 to 14 weeks. The study from University of Pennsylvania also
found that courses with lower student workloads and fewer homework assignments had somewhat higher completion rates on average. For more information, see: http://bit.ly/ 1cCYjvA
Benefits of the Flipped Classroom A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study found that students enrolled in their Basic Pharmaceutics II course much preferred the flipped version of the course and got better grades on the final examination. Educators in the flipped classroom course offloaded all lectures to self-paced online videos and used class time to engage students in active learning exercises, including in-class quizzes using audience response, small group discussion, student presentations, and paper-based quizzes, and microlectures of one to three minutes. The study results were published online in Academic Medicine: http://bit.ly/ 1bT9YFw
eLearning News Valerie Smothers from MedBiquitous in the US has been an enthusiastic Editor of the eLearning News feature over the past four years. She now has new responsibilities and is stepping down as Editor. We are very grateful to Valerie and her Contributors for their help over the years in putting together this very successful feature.
Do You Know? Contributor to this issue: R M Harden
Question 1 Given the calls for earlier student engagement in clinical experience, in what patient care activities can pre-clinical medical students legitimately participate?
character chunks. The messages often link to full-length articles or photos by including a URL. How can Twitter be used to enhance academic practice?
Question 4 Question 2 In problem-based learning (PBL) students play a key role. What are the four steps to success for a student in PBL?
Question 3 The online social media platform Twitter enables people to connect and communicate in short one hundred and forty 366
Student engagement in the university or medical school is now expected. In the ASPIRE-to-excellence initiative the engagement of students in the medical school and in the curriculum is one of the three areas where schools can be recognised for excellence. Students are partners in the learning process rather than simply consumers of an educational product. How can students be meaningfully engaged in the curriculum?
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
And finally. . .
Answer 1
Answer 3
In the USA, the student run clinic (SRC) is a common clinical entity that routinely relies on pre-clerkship medical students to provide direct patient care services under the supervision of licensed volunteer doctors. Chen and co-workers at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine conducted interviews with a sample of medical student and faculty volunteers. (Medical Education, 2014: 48; 136–145). They found that early medical students were capable of participating in patient care experiences that are typically reserved for more advanced learners and can engage to an extent not available to them in the core curriculum. Normally in an education programme clinical workplaces address risk by denying students opportunities to participate rather than by developing graded student responsibilities with appropriate supports. SRCs in contrast invite student participation and address risk by providing narrowly focussed responsibilities within a highly structured environment. The limited scopes of practice and access to focused training and support serve to grade student responsibilities, thereby affording pre-clerkship students opportunities to engage at the depth required for legitimate participation.
Beckingham and Adams, writing in Educational Developments (2013: 14; 10–13) describe how Twitter is becoming a ubiquitous force in educational development. They describe how it can be used in a number of ways for scholarly purposes. Twitter can help the teacher to keep abreast of new articles, trends and developments in higher education. Educational developers and researchers can also use Twitter to ask for ideas, input and support. Twitter can also be used by students to share information or to raise questions during a lecture, with a running stream of tweets shown on a screen for the lecturer to respond to. Students can be asked to tweet key points from a lecture and these can then be collated and viewed using tools such as ‘Storify’ to share the collection of tweets in a storyline or newspaper layout. Further information is available where 24 printable cards provide key tips to anyone wanting to get started with Twitter: http://www.slideshare.net/suebeckingham/getting-startedwith-twitter-23557615
Answer 2 Bate and Taylor describe in 12 tips on how to survive PBL as a medical student (Medical Teacher, 2013: 35; 95–100) the four steps to success for a student in PBL: understand why PBL is used; be aware of the group dynamics; learn how to collaborate with others; build social networks. This is discussed further in the AMEE Guide on the topic – Problem-based learning (PBL): Getting the most out of your students – their roles and responsibilities (Medical Teacher, 2014: 36; 1–12). Bate and co-workers describe how PBL is a learning process that requires students to be actively involved in collaborative group work with students taking responsibility for their learning. They argue that the key to a successful outcome (achieving educational objectives) is for students and faculty to understand the process of learning and their role in it. This is described in the Guide.
Answer 4 Carey writing in Innovations in Education and Teaching International (2013: 50; 250–260) studied students experience of participation in curriculum design. There is a need to switch from a complaints culture to encouraging students to offer solutions to problems. Feedback-on-feedback needs to be provided signalling to students that their voice is being heard and valued. Finally the foundation of student-friendly systems of engagement alleviates the power imbalance between students and the institution. This can include encouraging a more equal student staff ratio in meetings. Carey argues that there is little value in waiting until the curriculum needs an overhaul before involving students. The staff student partnership should not be a one off exchange but an ongoing process that characterises the whole student experience. It is argued that engagement is not simply about systems and procedures alone. An engagement culture needs to happen inside as well as outside the classroom to become a distinguishing feature of the learning and assessment strategy.
367
And finally. . .
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
Jottings by Saquarrah
In an editorial in Fundacio´n Educacio´n Me´dica (FEM, 2013: 16(4); 186–189) Gual et al argue that while progress has been made since the Edinburgh Declaration produced at the World Conference on Medical Education in 1988, we have come only a short way along the path to meeting the objectives. They write ‘Our education system, and more specifically the part of training that falls under the responsibility of universities, has again missed the opportunity to carry out real changes and has limited itself to making just superficial alterations. We have been more concerned with getting lots of things done instead of doing them well.’ It is interesting to revisit, as set out in the article, the major recommendations of the Edinburgh Declaration – introducing community-based learning, ensuring that curriculum content reflects health care priorities, promoting self-directed learning and life-long learning, synchronising the curriculum and assessment systems to achieve professional competence, training teachers as educators, addressing disease prevention and health promotion in the curriculum, integrating clinical practice into basic training and selecting candidates for medical studies on the basis of their personal qualities rather than their intellectual capabilities.
Textbooks have been seen as becoming increasingly obsolete. Friesen takes a contrary view and in an article in Educational Researcher (2013, 42(9); 498–508) proposes the textbook as an evolving pedagogical form and as a changing medium comprised of smaller media components. These components include images, diagrams and also oral prompts. Friesen talks about the metamorphosis of textual print material into a lively activity, a thinking-aloud and a self-explanation.
Kathy Kristof, an award winning financial journalist writes in Moneywatch (September 10, 2013) $1 million mistake: Becoming a doctor. She suggests that in the USA most doctors are dissatisfied with the job and less than half would choose a career in medicine if they were able to do it over again. One problem, it is claimed, is the increasing paperwork and administrative tasks which now account for nearly one quarter of a doctor’s day. The cost of becoming a doctor in the USA soared leaving the average newly qualified doctor with $166,750 in debt, while at the same time average salaries are declining. She argues that with the 11–14 year of higher education required to become a physician, the typical doctor does not earn a full-time salary until 10 years after the typical college graduate starts making money. With the cost of this lost decade of work and the time and cost it takes to pay off medical school debt ‘a dissatisfied physician may well consider pursuing medicine as a $1 million mistake.’ It is reported that across all specialities, physicians see roughly 13 patients per 368
day, work 52 hours per week and earn an average of $270,000 per year.
To be successful at work it helps to be aware of the people you are dealing with, suggests Jane Clarke in her book Savvy: Dealing with People, Power and Politics at Work. ‘Stars’ have all the skills needed to operate well in the work environment. ‘Naives’ have their hearts in the right place, they may be thought of as irritants, incompetents or innocents. ‘Machiavellian types’ are underhand but skilled at getting what they want. They are often highly controlling, ‘Barbarians’ are as subtle as a bull in a china shop. They are out for themselves and won’t think twice about stabbing others in the back. It is interesting how this might play out in medical education, for example in the transition to an integrated curriculum where one department is notoriously uncooperative. ‘Stars’ might set up a meeting to work through how best to collaborate. ‘Naives’ might email to staff in the department giving them some frank feedback and asking them to collaborate. ‘Machiavellians’ would talk to the Dean, listing the department’s failings and ask them to intervene. ‘Barbarians’ would make sure people in the faculty know how uncooperative the department is and tell them to complain.
The provision of students each day with one or two multiple choice questions and immediate feedback during a course led to greater self-confidence, enthusiasm and performance in the end of course test (Tanck et al, Perspect Med Educ, 2014: 3: 4–14). The questions were sent via email and were of increasing difficulty as the course progressed.
What determines the climate in an academic organisation was the subject of a study by McMurray in the Higher Education Research & Development (2013: 32(6); 960–974). A good organisational climate has been shown to be important for academic staff. McMurray and Scott found that for academic staff in a university environment, the aspects of their work environment that affects their feelings about the climate of their organisation is, firstly, support and this area should be targeted by university management seeking to improve the climate of their organisation and, hence, the performance of the academic staff. The second most important group of measures are those of trust and fairness, while the third group is innovation and recognition.
The University of London has published a report on their Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
And finally. . .
Med Teach Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by Selcuk Universitesi on 01/25/15 For personal use only.
(www.londoninternational.ac.uk). Four MOOCs were offered in June 2013 each lasting six weeks and designed to provide a short introduction to subjects offered as full degrees. These attracted over 210,000 initial registrations, over 90,000 active students in their first week from over 160 countries and lead to 8843 Statements of Accomplishment being attained. Over 30 students who applied to one of the 2013/2014 fee paying programmes indicated that they took one of the MOOCs beforehand. The report discusses the range of styles and learning methods adopted by the four MOOCs and highlights key points for consideration in the development of resources for future MOOCs.
Uncovering innovations that are invisible in plain sight was the subject of an article in Phi Delta Kappan (2013, 95: 28–33) by Arvind Singhal. He argues that to discover important innovative practices that may otherwise be ignored, attention should be paid to positive deviants. These are individuals who face the same challenges as others and have the same resources but still manage to find ways to effectively address problems. He gives an example of a study of child malnutrition in an area south of Hanoi. While the instance of malnutrition was high there were some children from very poor families
who were well-nourished. Those who managed to avoid malnutrition without access to any special resources were the positive deviants. It was found that the families of these children were practising a few simple behaviours that others were not. For example, families collected tiny shrimps and crabs and added them to their children’s meals. Families were feeding their children smaller meals three to four times a day rather than the customary large two a day and families were feeding the children rather than placing food in front of them, making sure no food was wasted. Perhaps we need to study more positive deviants in medical education.
Randomised trials of specific professional development programmes have not enhanced our knowledge of effective faculty development programme characteristics, leaving us without guidance with regard to best practices, suggests Hill et al (Educational Researcher, 2013: 42(9); 476–487). They suggest it is too early to tell why the results of randomised trials contradict conventional wisdom among researchers in this field, the reason they argue may be that the content of specific programmes evaluated may have been ineffectual, while programmes may have deviated from best practices in important ways due to poor implementation.sss
369
