In his latest blog Professor Harden discusses student engagement, Edward De Bono, lecture notes shared online, and being Zoomed out.
Student engagement
I am impressed by the large number of letters to Medical Teacher we receive from students in which they express their views about articles published in the journal and give examples from their own experience. Unfortunately, we are able to publish only a small number of those received. Topics in recent articles in Medical Teacher that have particularly attracted students’ comments have been reporting errors in practice (Chen et al 2021), the patient as an examiner in the OSCE (Moulton et al 2021), and preparing students educationally for ward rounds (Bell et al 2021).
Edward De Bono
Edward De Bono died aged 89 on 9th June 2021. He was perhaps best known for his books on problem solving and creative thinking, including the Six Thinking Hats. It was medicine that sparked his career as a thinker. He contributed a plenary presentation at the AMEE Conference in Edinburgh in 2004. Sitting on a chair at the front of the stage he captivated the audience by drawing as he spoke on an overhead projector acetate to illustrate his presentation. We still have in the AMEE office the acetate scroll with his drawings.
Academics angry as lecture notes are shared online
In Times Higher Education 30th September 2021, reports the anger that is being expressed by teachers when they find that their lecture notes are published in StuDoc, a filesharing website. StuDoc boasts 15 million users with more than 4 million resources on the site. Teachers are angered that students have been sharing not just their notes but also material produced by them such as handouts, lecture slides, and multiple-choice questions. It will be interesting to see how the issues raised are resolved, given the tensions between the need to widely share resources and the protection of lecturers’ own materials.
Zoomed out
The British Airways magazine Business Life in its September/October 2021 issue features the move over the last 18 months to online meetings, many using Zoom. Zoom’s share price has risen tenfold in 2020 compared to 2019. Using Zoom it is not long, however, before video conferencing fatigue sets in, as reported even for the CEO of Zoom.
Working from home has been the new paradigm as adopted by some companies as the new norm, though not all agree. Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon described remote working as “an aberration” that needed to be corrected “as quickly as possible”. What we are likely to see in the future is hybrid working with two to three days of work per week in the office.