Improving the Efficiency of Didactic Medical Teaching by Means of Podcast
Journal of Academic Ophthalmology 2010, Volume 3, Number 1 22 Introduction The burden of increasing information assimilation has become the defining characteristic of medical educa-tion. The traditional approach to accommodating new medical information has been to winnow out elements of the existing curriculum. However, this increasing burden of information necessitates the development of more efficient teaching methods. Recent technological advances, including podcasting, may provide an opportunity to augment the informa-tion provided by traditional classroom-based medical education while reducing class time. Podcasts are media files that can be distributed via the Internet and played on computers and handheld devices, such as iPods or other digital audio players. [1] It is esti-mated that educational podcasts make up 7 percent of the total number of downloadable podcasts [2]. Pod-casting is now employed in several undergraduate programs in the United States [3] and United King-dom, [4] as well as in several nursing and dental edu-cation programs, [1] preclinical medical education, [5] medical journals, and patient education [6]. Many health science education podcasts consist of re-cordings of existing classroom lectures for later re-view and study. Some surgical [7] and critical care [8] programs have also begun to use video podcasts to teach procedures. This pilot study in podcast-enhanced didactic medical teaching sought to develop a more efficient and indi-vidualized approach to didactic ophthalmology teach-ing by incorporating lecture podcasts into the syllabus of the clinical optics section of the required Basic Sci-ence series for ophthalmology residents at New York University. Methods The project was a pilot study in podcast-enhanced didactic medical teaching and was limited to the Ap-plied Optics section of the ophthalmology basic sci-ence series. This section originally consisted of 20 hours of lecture and group problem-solving sessions. Ten hours of classroom time were adopted for the podcast-enhanced method. Each of the twenty topics was recorded as a separate video podcast. Each lec-ture consisted of PowerPoint slides formatted to be Improving the Efficiency of Didactic Medical Teaching by Means of Podcast Joshua A. Young, MD