Slashdot Mirror
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 idea,s a bit sick (pun intended)
As I recall, right in the middle of the dot-com boom Microsoft started an online, collaborative center for Medical education by buying out a bunch of sites. It was called the "MSN Healing Zone" and didn't last for very long...
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
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.
"Did you go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical School too?"
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I'm so excited to have you as a patient. I never had to cut anything open in med school and this is my first chance!
Online schools deprive you of needed experience and interaction -- and that's particularly bad for the field of medicine, which requires LOTS of hands-on experience. Even worse than cassette tape courses at colleges, online degrees in general are a joke that the vast, vast majority of people flunk out of or quit.
The idea is a total waste of money -- there is no way that the brain drain will stop until for-profit Healthcare corporations quit hiring so many H1B doctors for wages that are much lower than doctors here yet are still higher than those in the third world; that goes for just about every other erudite profession, as well.
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
Not a chance that I would go see a doctor who got their degree online.
For gross anatomy, everyone will be mailed their own copy of the Operation! board game. These guys will be very good at diagnosing and fixing charlie horses and wrenched knees.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Medical School is a great deal like Law School - memorization and understanding of the relevent background material. People who are saying "they don't get hands on live patients" misunderstand what medschool *IS*.
Only after medschool, when you are an intern, do you get to work with patients, and only with the supervision of a resident. No character on ER (except for some one-episode people who are trying to figure out what rotation to join) are med students. Rather, they are all interns or residents.
I hope this helps in your evaluation of the feasability of this program (MHO - somewhat feasable, but may lack hands-on cadaver work.)
Just say you are studying to become a gynecologist.
-- Will program for bandwidth
IANAD, but I'm married to one. And having seen her go through Harvard Med, all I can say is that what she learned that was bookish or memorized was only a small part of her education. And I don't mean things as obvious as surgery, which you really don't learn as a med student anyway. Here is a short list of things you don't learn studying a screen: clinical judgement, the physical exam (how does a healthy liver feel?), reading films and slides, not to mention patient interaction in order to get as close-to-accurate info as possible. Pretty quick in med school, you start working wiht patients, and just getting comfortable and good at the interview, exam, and writing a good note about it is not easy.
If you can put it online to learn it, you can also go online to look it up. I want a doctor who has the skills, perceptions, and judgement you get by doing.
...begins in wonder
Oh wait: it is
- undoware.ca
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.
Act now, and we'll mail you a cadaver -- FREE -- with your enrollment!
Really cool scheme very much like the paperless college ideas that have been floating around
I don't think that the idea is to let more people study medecine , more along the lines of everyone who is studing it and will be studying it, will be using the same resources
ie. I'm studing in Athens and decide to move to London to study then I'll be using the same material as long as I go to a university that is part of the group and I would have to worry about having used diff. text books and such
Standardisation
Oh well that's just my take
I'll sign up - just for the interesting conversations with the FEDEX driver then they deliver the cadaver to my home every few months...
"You know there is a dead body in here, right?"
"Brings a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death", no?
Great, that's all I need; my doctor slips up while I'm on the operating table and he spends the next 5 minutes making motions with his hand as if to hit the "back" button on a web browser.
me: "Something wrong, Doc?"
doctor: "No.. at least... I don't think so. It's just that I've never seen a real live patient before; at least not I. R. L."
"Damn, nurse... brain surgery is sooo much easier when you can use two hands!"
nurse: "Doctor! Doctor! Have you ever had experience with this kind of disease?!
doctor: "Of course I have! Level 34, just before I grabbed the RailGun."
wife: "Doctor, is my husband... going to die?"
doctor: "Nah, if it gets too bad, I'll just pull the plug on the router and it'll look like we lost the connection. Then I'll try again."
*doctor smiles while the wife wonders what the hell he's talking about*
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I've been using Microsoft Flight Sim since it first came out!
That makes me a pilot!
Casual Games/Downloads
Initial financing for the project, amounting to $140,000, came from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.
;-)
$24,917 * 7 = ~175k
Which, ironically, is about the cost of the tuition for the 7 years of med school for only one student. If they get two students, they will already be doubling their money
HowTo become a doctor
Live web cams
I've taken two courses online in the past couple of years. Both were pretty miserable.
The general way an online course works is through the extensive use of message boards which allow the students to interact with each other. Real time chat and whiteboard software are also used. Supporters claim that the experience equals that of a real classroom, but my first hand experience is that it does not. Several days ago, I was discussing online classes with a former instructor of mine. His wife teaches some online courses and she contends that her online students are getting perhaps 60% of the education they could receive in a physical classroom - and this is from an instructor who in my experience truly cares about her students.
The first course I took was Intro to Philosophy. The instructor would post a weekly lecture and assign all the typical reading required in a Phil 100 class. Then you had lists of questions to answer and post to the board where everyone else was supposed to respond to your answers, and you responded to theirs. Then you responded to their responses, etc, etc, etc. One day I got tied up and couldn't log on for almost 36 hours - there were nearly two hundred new messages waiting. I ended up dropping the course after the second week because the sheer amount of material combined with math and chemistry courses was overwhelming.
This summer, I took and completed a humanities course entitled _Survey of World Literature_. The class received absolutely no input from the instructor other than the weekly lecture. The only time the instructor made her presence known was to answer direct questions posted in a special ask the instructor board (usually of the I forgot to do an assignment can I please turn it in late whine.) Wildly inaccurate and misguided posts from students went unchallenged by the faculty member in charge. I suspect that the instructor may not have even read the individual postings, but I can't prove it.
Online courses may be very good for people of a particular personality - one who is very self driven, who isn't really into the face-to-face interaction of a classroom setting. In general however, I just don't feel like the technology has reached a point where the education delivered is of the same caliber.
Crocuta
I'm regestering with the nic "Hannibal Lector"
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I go to the one source that has all the answers: Ask Jeeves
Q: What do they call the person who graduates bottom of their medical class?
A: Doctor.
I, for one, think any new well-researched, diagnosis-focused, detailed and systematic way of partially training doctors (read the fsking article!) is to be welcomed.
Oh wait..the house calls would be by a virtual doctor... Never Mind!
When you know the answer is "NO"!
The inevitable answer is that this will open up the medical degree experience for many- some will do nothing with it and some will flourish and become star doctors.
Bringing up an idea without any research or (even better) empirical results on slashdot is giving the professional naysayers far too much grist for the mill.
I'm sure if you said "What if we started a global network! And have it initially funded by the government..." on the 1950's version of slashdot all those schmucks would have said "What, and call it the internet? hah! It'll never work!"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Excuse me while I chime in here. I'm not a real
doctor but I play one on IM. Clients often ask me: "Doctor, why is it that I feel bad." And I chuckle and I say, "Listen to me SuckMe93, I've had lots of patients like you: People that just don't feel good. I've seen them come and I've seen them go. But in the end it all works out. It's like the skaters say: 'It's all good.'"
Now my point is, we're all doctors aren't we? I mean we take a little, we give a little. We wake up, we feel good. We sleep, and then we swim in the sea of life and we heal.
Thanks for listening,
- The Doctor.
Then obviously you haven't been following medical technology.
Surgeons have been performing surgery remotely! Through a computer!
Hell, I even helped develop a virtual laparoscopic surgical simulator (3d spacial recognition and other goodies). Know where surgeons currently learn? On live patients. Wouldn't you rather have a surgeon who's gone a couple rounds with a simulator rather than someone who has no experience?
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
Ahh, will the students still have the opportunity to watch an autopsy? I remember a Quincy episode when he was due to teach a class of med students, but needed to do some investigating and couldn't get out of the class... and then made the entire class all pass out/throw up within minutes!
I have a friend doing a Medical related degree at Edinburgh (not sure precisely which kind), and she said their compulsory module on autopsies wasn't initially fun (half the class didn't stay conscious long enough). But they are taught hands on experience from the very beginning.
Given the state of the British NHS (overworked, underfunded yadda yadda), I'm not sure how much it will affect the 'brain drain' in that they still could end up going overseas anyway.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Where do I get these textbooks?
So what would you do if an unforseen problem arises? Like say the patient goes into cardiac arrest?
Oh don't worry, I just reboot the system and start over.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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.
Funnily enough, each year that particular lecture is filled to capacity with people who dress and sound a lot more like engineers than med students :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I will be a doctor in 6 months, graduating from an American university. I feel that this idea is just going in the wrong direction. The first two years are pretty much the same all over the country. Just basic science with some clinical exposure.
What's unfortunate is that the students will still be getting the most important part of their training in their home environments. The clinical years are where the majority of applicable skills are learned. The quality of residents, attending physicians, and individual departments help determine how much exposure students get to the cutting edge of modern medicine.
These students might get a better pre-clinical education than they would have. However, they run the risk of adopting all the bad habits of American medicine (focus on pathology, not the patient) without the benefits of its strengths (appropriate application in a compassionate setting).
In short, the best and brightest from other countries will still leave their home countries...
(And just in response to other comments, medical students have much of the same experiences and training as interns and residents just without the actual responsibility)
Invicta{HOG}
What about training normal people in developing countries? I understand its great to have more doctors, but what about training the local Grandma/Shaman/Elder in basic medicine? Could be a great help in lots of developing nations that would never get proper medical treatment otherwise.
Something like this, maybe put on to handheld computers and given out to the locals could go a long way towards elevating their medical standards. Granted its not like they'll be able to perform surgery, but for 90% of the 'first aid' incidents they'll be much better off.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I'm an Othopaedic surg resident. Some of the residency interviews have a manual skills section where they've used the operation board game, or have guys(not too many women in ortho!) build weird little models with the erector sets in insanely short times.
A lot of dental schools also have a manual skills section of the interview - getting to those out of the way places in the back of the mouth takes some fine dexterity....
Anyway Orthopedics is a lot of fun we get to play with cool power tools and build weird erector set like models like these
..........FULL STOP.
(I am posting pretty late on this article, hopefully some moderators may catch it yet, and place it so it can be seen).
I am a final year in medical school. I spend a lot of my time on various medical education internet services.
This already goes on. A better title would have been: 'Some medical schools agree to pool their resources and decide to share their online course materials'. As a matter of fact, the licensing exam in the USA is a 8 or 9 hour computer-based multiple choice test, and the students prepare for it by taking practice computer tests online.
Schools vary in their clinical vs. didactic education, but really, alot of the first 2 years of medical school getting up to speed on what the tissues are, the groups of microbes, basic genetic prinicples, major biochemical pathways.
Yes their are some students that don't go to class at all for the first 2 years when all they are doing there is listening to teachers talk. Only 5% of learners are primarily auditory, and yet the lecture is primarily talk. I feel students should be allowed to pursue the path that gets the best results for them: if they can learn all their microbiology at home by spending 18 hour days, instead of wasting time in travel on a bus, then sitting to a teacher talk, they should be allowed to do so. The results at the end are what matters. All students are required to pass a licensing examination--if people think that the licensing examination somehow allows incompetent doctors through, then the exam should be changed.
Online threaded conversations allow a good archive of question and answer for learning: things like physio aren't going to change much, and nice to have access to the prior students questions and answers from previous years.
The ancillary skill of becoming computer-savvy is required for a doctor starting out now. There is an avalanche of new information to sift though online, and proper gathering techniques and critical assessment is required. One should be familiar with tech aids at the point of care if they can reduce errors (eg a PDA of drugs which can compare interactions of all 7 drugs that an elderly patient is on, to see if it causing a side effect). The latest journal articles are best found with PubMed online, if one hasn't learned the sklll of good data mining, their knowledge will fade from the cutting edge quick enough.
There is different subsets of learners. Some members of a group will have excellent communication in a live group at the start, others may feel more at ease asking/answering questions in a virtual group, and building their confidence, so that hitting the live group becomes easier.
For simulations, they make a good adjunct to the real thing. It provides a introduction to a proper case of a disease which may difficult to see in the med school's hospital. For example, Lyme disease is important to recognize on a patient, but most med students in Ireland will never see one. However, Irish citizens do to USA, get it, come back, and the result is tragic after the disease has progressed undiagnosed by the first line doctors who have never seen someone before with the classic signs.
Visiting conferences in medical education, there is a lot of schools in 2nd world countries that now have computers and a half-way decent internet connection, but there isn't enough money to fund creation of well-made high-tech content to use. Hence, willingness of the richer universities to help the developing ones in knowledge is a welcomed trend.
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Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
Developing countries have "brain drain" because their economies have not grown to the extent of developed countries.
Under pressure from the IMF/WB, many developing countries have significantly expanded their educational systems. Unfortunately, many studies have indicated that the expansion of education has had little average effect on increasing economic growth. Education is only useful if there is a demand for you with your education in your economy. If the only jobs are working in fields, you are better off working in the fields and earning money rather than wasting time in class. If there are no jobs for college educated in your country, you will either have wasted your education, or you try to go to another country where there are jobs for your college education. I'm not saying that education is unimportant for growth, because it is since sustainable long-term growth comes from investment in technology, but it is not sufficient for growth.
The requirements for economic growth is a stable monetary system, low government corruption, democracy, limited regulation (including business, labor, and trade controls), low budget deficits, privatization (including land), respect for property rights, and non-negative real interest rates. And then education can help.
Another issue is while "brain drain" is bad in one sense, there is a tremendous amount of money flowing back into developing countries from expatriots. El Salvador, for instance, gets 1/7th of its GDP from expatriot remissions. India also gets a large amount as well. Studies do indicate that remissions do not fully offset growth losses due to "brain drain," but at least they make up for some of the loss.