A shift is needed in the system of medical student education. In the past century to recent, the volume of medical knowledge has risen, the complexity of the health care system has grown a lot, pedagogical methods have evolved, and unprecedented opportunities for technological support of learners have become necessarily available. Yet students are being taught roughly the same way they were taught when the Wright brothers were busy working on inventing airplanes.
The era for online medical learning is no more at the door – It is already seated on the couch! Available to every one. Different medical stakeholders are convinced that the way forward in medical education is online medical schooling – No more of the old way, now teachers would be able to actually teach, rather than merely make speeches.
Online Medical Schools presents a flipped-classroom model, where students absorb an instructor’s lecture in a digital format as homework, freeing up class time for a focus on applications. This includes simulation excercises opportunities problem-based and team-based exercises — strategies that activate prior knowledge.
Online Medical School can be defined as a type of learning where students are trained to become health care providers partially or entirely over the internet. This definition excludes purely print-based correspondence education, broadcast television or radio, videoconferencing, videocassettes, and stand-alone educational software programs that do not have a significant internet-based instructional component.
The pre-medical course will give you knowledge in sciences and mathematics recommended for students who want to study medicine in a medical university abroad. There are number of specializations in the health care sector from which premedical students can choose to focus their studies on, each sector leads to a particular career within the medical world. These studies can be done in an online medical school – through the internet.
A pre-medical student can enroll in an online medical school which allows the student to take lectures, assignments and exams from any location in the world as long as there is an internet connection. This flexibility allows people who previously could not consider a medical career to overcome personal, family, professional, geographic, and other barriers to attend medical school. Several medical classes and programs are moving online. Portions of classes in cardiovascular physiology and endocrinology are being made more interactive by going online.
In a UK Online Medical School, the endocrinology and women’s health tutorial, part of the Human Health and Disease course, brings together people from pathology, endocrinology, gerontology, and obstetrics and gynecology. Before going to class, students will watch online videotaped lectures.
A big advantage is that students who do not follow a particular point can pause and replay the video, or pause and consult someone about the subject. Using the online platform, students come to class and meet with patients (live or on video), debate with their class mates and do group exercises, putting into practice what they have learned beforehand.
Even as the traditional lecture format persist with the conventional campus-based system, many complain that the system is failing to produce well trained medical personnel. Since the hours available in a day have not increased to accommodate the expanded medical canon, the alternative is to make better use of our students’ time. This article believes that medical education can be improved without increasing the time it takes to earn a medical degree, if we make lessons “stickier” (more comprehensible and memorable) and use a learning system that is self-paced. For instance, messages are stickier when they are unexpected enough to capture our curiosity.
For example, a biochemistry course at Stanford Medical School was redesigned following this model; instead of a standard lecture-based format, the lecturers provided online classes. Then in class, the time was used for interactive discussions. The percentage of students who attended class shot up from about 25% to 85% — even though class attendance was optional.
It is clear that online instruction is effective and scalable. For example, one university`s computer science department has shifted several courses to instruction using 15-to-20-minute video segments with quizzes to engage students and test their comprehension. Professors are then using class time to challenge students with hands-on exercises, and class attendance has increased substantially. Off campus, three computer science courses, offered free, have been viewed by more than 400,000 enrollees from around the world. A meta-analysis published by the Department of Education has concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” with even bigger effects when the online learning was combined with face-to-face instruction.
There is no doubt that online learning can boost engagement and retention. Medical students who are learning critical biochemical material by watching short videos as many times as they need in order to learn the subject will surely pass the relevant test. And they can do so in the comfort of their own personal space. Then, in class, the students participate in discussions and share information. The relevant subject — which looks dry in a textbook — suddenly comes to life.