Your new post is loading...
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer high-quality content from world-class universities to anyone with access to the worldwide web for free. Since their inception in 2012, much has been written in the popular press and by academicians opining in editorials, blogs and scholarly journals on the value of MOOCs and their likely impact on the future of higher education, even medical education. For their part, thought-leaders in academic medicine are already predicting the transformative impact of MOOCs across the continuum of education in the health professions. For example, Mehta et al. envisioned MOOCs as a key facilitator of competency-based, learner-centered medical education that can better meet the needs of societies and their changing healthcare systems.[1] Prober and Khan argued that several key strategic factors are driving the need to “reimagine” medical education where online learning would facilitate evidence-based, flipped-classroom teaching and cost-efficient, cooperative curriculum sharing across schools of medicine.[2]
Many of us in medical education agree with these fundamentals and recognize that MOOCs (and other eLearning innovations) convey the potential to radically transform both the means and costs of education in the health professions for post-baccalaureate students, residents, fellows and even licensed healthcare professionals.[3] My purpose here is not to advocate for such transformation, although most of my campus-based students would surely welcome it. Rather, my goal is simply to share five lessons that I am learning from the trenches of medical education through my efforts to create a blended learning environment for the development of future healthcare professionals in the neurological sciences.
Via Miloš Bajčetić, Tricia Makowiak
