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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 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...
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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.
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.
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
This isn't true. I just spent the last 5 years watching my wife and all her friends go from taking the MCATs to becoming interns. First year is alot of studying, but you do the whole cadavar thing. But in first year, and even more so in second year, you learn the physical exam and patient interviewing. They do rotations all 3rd and 4th year, including doing a sub-internship as a 4th year where yes, you are even playing the role of an intern. And BTW - there are med students on ER, though no longer including Lucy since she departed the show the hard way.
...begins in wonder
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 disagree. I have a friend who is starting out at med school, and the very first week they had her and her classmates assigned to a doctor to accompany him/her on their rounds and to get them started up taking blood pressure, reading charts, real basic stuff. What they were *really* supposed to be learning was how to act around patients with tact and confidence. Lets face it; if the Dr. acts like a schmuck when you come in for whatever, you're not going to trust them. Also, like you mentioned there is nothing quite like working on a cadaver--when I was an undergrad I had to dissect quite a few organisms to understand physiology and the computer simulations while good are not as good as the real thing. Plus if you're working on a cadaver, it hammers home that you're going to be working on *people* like no computer simulation ever could. As for the wrote memorization biochemistry for med students or whatnot, I don't know about you but my lecture/memorization courses were *always* accompanied by labs to help you understand the material in context. These online degrees are generally inferior and I sure as hell don't want my doctor to have been "educated" in one.
Actually, as one who completed the first two years of medical school and then progressed to a Ph.D. program (don't know if I will go back), I can tell you that there is a tremendous amount of first hand experience that needs to occur and cannot be duplicated in a virtual environment. Many schools are now starting to integrate some pateint exposure to medical students in the first two years for instance. As for other "tangible" experiences, I only have to cite gross anatomy. This class absolutely must be taken by medical students and there is no virtual substitute for actually physically taking a body apart and learning where cavities are and how things fit together. For instance, where does blood pool when you have an internal bleed? How do the sinuses in the head relate to other structures? etc...etc...etc... This is possible to learn from an "academic" sense, but honestly, there is no substitute. Additionally, most gross anatomy classes are the first opportunity medical students get to touch bodies, and believe it or not, respect for the human body, and the sacrifice the donors made is something else that is an important experience.
As for the intern bit, yes, most physicians learn most from the first post graduate year, but you ABSOLUTELY do touch patients before your internship. You get to intubate, learn how to ascultate heart and breath sounds, interview patients assist with surgeries, set broken bones, suture wounds etc...etc...etc... all in your third and fourth years of medical school. Typically under the supervision of attending and senior residents of course.
I would be truly scared of anyone who did not have that experience before starting an intership and residency.
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"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*
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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
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.
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}
Every doctor I've gone to has his diploma hanging on the wall. If his diploma even resembles a printout of a web page, I'm outta there! :)