Rodion Kutsaev. Public domain via Unsplash
Virtual Reality. Augmented Reality. Gamified Learning. Blended Learning. Mobile Learning. The list of technologies that promise to revolutionise medical education (or education in general) could go on, creating an exciting yet daunting task for the course leaders and educators who have to evaluate them. The visceral appeal of technology is understandable: technology is cool, and it’s increasingly a part of student’s lives and therefore something that they expect to be integrated into their curriculum.
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that use of technology is only a means to an end, and without a clearly defined implementation plan and goal, projects are often doomed to fail. Medical schools therefore have the difficult job of balancing student demand for technology with resource constraints and opportunity costs. This isn’t easy, especially considering that technology is evolving at such a rate that it is very difficult to find traditional evidence-based appraisals of these implementations, before the technology that was being tested is obsolete.
Considering this, it’s easy to see how unchecked enthusiasm for technology could be disastrous, if medical schools were to take too many risks and replace traditional-but-proven learning models with exciting-but-unproven tech-based alternatives. An example of this can be seen in ‘Problem Based Learning’, an intuitively appealing idea that medical schools could modernise their approach to teaching by creating a curriculum that traded traditional lectures for small, group-based discussions where students were ‘put in charge of their own learning’ and encouraged to solve problems.
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