Posted on by Joel Topf

We need to do it differently

Michael Heung of the University of Michigan tweeted this yesterday

Here is the image again in case Twitter breaks.

This is not an uncommon finding at medical schools around the country. I have been to lectures by Dr. Heung at Kidney Week and he is a gifted teacher. There is nothing wrong with him. The knee-jerk response is to do what Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine did and make lectures mandatory. I get a full auditorium for every one of my lectures. It strokes my (already formidible) ego, but I don’t think it is the right response.

The empty lecture hall is because medical students are finding ways to learn that are better for them than sitting in a class room six hours a day. It’s more efficient to stream the lecture at 2x-speed with tabs open to other resources. If this is how they learn best, schools shouldn’t enforce inefficiency by making them attend lectures. Medical school deans should recognize how the material is going to be consumed and then develop curriculum around that consumption.

Every medical student, after paying tens of thousands of dollars for tuition, spends additional thousands of dollars on materials, tutorials, and videos to get ready for the big bad board exam at the end. What is the core competency of medical schools if it is not getting students ready to excel at licensing exams? Every one of those subscriptions is an indictment of the product that medical schools are providing their students.

Here is a list of vendors from the 2018 American Medical Student Association Convention. Check marks indicate vendors that provide services that medical students should be getting from their (wildly expensive) schools.

If we were to start from the position that students are going to consume every lecture on their own time on their own laptop, would we record the same slide show with the same talking head every year? No, that’s an absurd waste of the professor’s time to produce content that is not compelling or a good use of the medium. This is like the first movies, where directors would just film stage productions, ignoring the nature of the novel medium. Instead of seeing the empty lecture halls as a problem it should be viewed as the huge opportunity it is. The students have already moved to the new medium, it is time for medical schools to catch up.

It is time to turn those lecture halls into production studios. It is time to hire professional animators, artists, and video producers, and go from slide shows that need to be performed live every year to tightly produced educational shows that can be created once and shown many times. Let’s teach for the contemporary reality, rather than fight it with rules that serve to waste student’s and teacher’s time.