January 30, 2006
Student Scene
Podcasting Comes to Med School Curriculum
Starting on Dec. 1, HMS course lectures became available for download onto the iPods of students, faculty, and staff. The lectures are translated into MP3 audio files, which community members can download after subscribing to the class’s podcast feed. “This is the first time any medical school, to my knowledge, has used an iPod as an educational tool to distribute the entire curriculum,” said John Halamka, HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chief information officer at HMS.
Photo by Marc Raila
Student David Stark uses his iPod to review a Human Systems lecture.
Sixty-eight percent of students have iPods, explained Halamka. “It’s the education device of the future.” Podcasts are being used by media outlets such as NPR, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Boston Globe. Using them for educational purposes, said Halamka, is the obvious next step.
The podcasts are just one way in which new technologies are being integrated into medical education. Videos of every course’s lectures are added to MyCourses daily, and word-recognition software allows users to search every archived lecture for a given word or phrase. This allows individuals to search across disciplines and courses for segments of lectures that deal specifically with their area of interest. Results show users exactly what portion of the lecture contains a discussion of their search term, allowing them to link directly to the relevant section of the video on their computer or fast-forward to it on their iPod.
To view lecture videos and subscribe to the audio podcast of a course, users can visit MyCourses and click on “events” under a course in their sidebar (if no course is listed, some can be added through a search in the “Course list” option). Directions on subscribing to the course’s podcast are available by clicking on the “RSS podcast” button.
Copyright 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College