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Organizers Plan Online Medical School
slashdot_commentator writes "Job has you down? Thinking of starting a second career? How about finally getting that medical degree you've been putting off? A group of more than 50 schools in 16 countries are working to create an online medical school, in part to combat the "brain drain" that occurs when medical students go abroad for their education but do not return later. ... Organizers said that because degrees would be granted by individual participating schools, all of which are accredited, students should not have to worry about accreditation problems."
The classroom part of this can be done online. But what about the labs and the on the job training? Many hospitals are teaching hospitals where the medical students work alongside doctors.
I wonder if they'll have a problem convincing local hospitals and medical centers to let students who learned all they know online work for them. It might work, and well, but I can forsee a lot of resistance to this at first.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Whether it scares you or not, my medical school can be mostly attended online, as well.
All the lectures are recorded in RealAudio, and most of the lecturers show slides in PowerPoint (available for download). The ones that use standard overheads put the handouts in our mailboxes. The students pool together to make transcripts of the lectures, which are very high quality. Tests are online.
The upshot of this is about half of the class rarely attends lectures. Some students NEVER attend the lectures, live 2 hours away, and drive in once a week for the clinical stuff in the hospitals. Just today, a review lecture had an attendance of 14 people out of 160. (I was there because I had to record the RealAudio)
This is just for the first two "basic science" years. Years 3 and 4 are in the hospital wards, getting hands-on experience. Obviously, that can't be done over the web.
I've found that in med school, there is more of an attitude that the students are in charge, and an acknowledgement that people learn in different ways. The faculty will generally go out of their way to make sure you can get all the material. The students are motivated enough to learn on their own. If they learn best by skipping class, the faculty is OK with this.
There's nothing wrong with the University of Phoenix that isn't wrong with other schools. The only folks who hate it are those who tried and failed. I've done both traditional college (for 3 yrs) and UoP, and I'll take UoP any day.
:-)
I learned more and I was challenged a hell of a lot more. At UoP I actually learned to communicate with people (horror of horrors!). After all, a good part of your grade depends on how well you can communicate and work with a learning team.
After nearly two years of writing around 6 or 7 papers every five weeks, I find myself panicking and looking around for material to research and write a paper on. Blog time! Yes, somehow open source, Buddhism and B-school can make for a blog - at least it's not the strangest one out there.
Some folks just can't hack that. And BTW - I made it through my entire Bachelor's degree without ever firing up any of the MS Office suite. I used Open Office all the way, even back when it was still fairly beta. Their #$!$ website works only with IE though. They know me by name on their complaint line by now.
My favorite part was in statistics because of the Math thingy in OOo. I could make those formulas look absolutely beautiful.
Well, there *was* MS Project... but I did do a presentation on sourceforge during that class just to make myself feel better. I sold it as "the future of collaborative project management". I got extra points.
I know quite a bit about online education... I think it's a good thing. People seem to be taking very reactionary views, without much knowledge about the subject (totally out-of-character for /.).
I'm studying at Columbia University through their online system. Lectures are viewed via Windows Media Player, along with still images (indexed by time against the ASF stream). Professors are available via phone/e-mail and I sometimes go to their offices.
I've just completed a degree in Genetics and am working towards my MSEE. Overall, I think online education is great. Without it, there's no way I could make the commute in to NYC a few times a week to attend class[es], and still hold down a full-time job.
I've certainly benefitted from this. I have had a number of papers published since I started (they are in leukemia diagnosis techniques and gene ontology discovery). I also have a few patents (I know, I'm evil...).
Now, maybe I'm not the typical student. When I got my BS (in astrophysics), I rarely attended classes. I may just learn well on my own, but I can assure you that people can do it.
If, as they say, you are really just doing your classroom portion of the program online, there's nothing wrong with that at all.
It's very convenient. Isn't that what technology is for?
I'm in one of these online programs and I think it's good in my particular case. First, I don't ever intend to become a clinician. It's my second academic discipline and I only intend to use the knowledge to develop computerized biologic models and diagnostic systems (you'd be shocked about how often they'll be used in the next 10 years for differentials and proposed treatment regimens!)
Also, I need to understand human physiology to work on new diagnostic tools (like fMRI's with a better signal-to-noise discrimination so they can be portable) and to integrate biological information system theories with "artificial" ones. I guarantee that computer science (esp. genetic algorithms, neural network expert systems, and adaptive cellular automata) and human physiology (esp. neural systems, genetics, proteomics, immunology, and cytokine data flow) will grow closer and closer together in the future. It will be a new discipline of its own.
But for clinical work you need skill memory, and you'll never get that online.