A while ago, I was thinking in a brain dump about how the ability to effectively retrieve, manage, critically assess and then apply information is what medical learning – and for my two cents, any learning period – should be all about. Part of what brought this conversation on was the U of A Med school’s use of older teaching techniques and their loss of accreditation from the US body that deals with those sorts of things.
Today, I attended a session where the presenter was talking about how the U of A med school is actually going to get out of that “classic” teaching hole. A disclaimer as to what follows, this is not the official line, but as with everything else that comes off a blog, this is my take on what I understood from my experience. The U of A Medical school has actually been a champion of learning communities and technology enhanced communication for quite some time for it’s continuing education programs, but not so for it’s new doc training. So they have decided to roll what they know they are doing well – using communities of practice, together with what they have tried before and found effective – things like their Histoquest system and “what’s hip with students”. In the past this has been using things like PDAs, but now that is using Web2.0 bits like Facebook.
They have done this rolling by using Vividesk (a product of CHE – Centre for Health Evidence) and they have created a slick little system that is part CMS/LMS and part working health professional portal. The system creates an integrated, single sign on environment that allows for university and provincial systems to be presented to the learner and the practitioner in the way that is most relevant to their level of real world experience (job related, not system related). The system can also track the actions of the users in the system, so they can determine what resources are most used (not always the most useful though…) and how learning objectives are being reached (helps in the whole accreditation thing) as well as helps instructors and admins understand how problems are being solved when they are presented to the learner. This enables them to determine how well the learner is able to manage and apply what is being presented. With any luck, this will help them get through all their hurdles and start changing the way that medical instruction is done, focusing more on being able to find content, synthesize an answer and apply the results as opposed to being exposed to a range of situations and practicing (until perfect) what the “best” thing to do is.
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