Medical Education Technology

The Medical Council of India has laid down a number of requirements for medical education. One requirement is that each medical teacher should be trained by a recognized institute in medical educational technology. The health university follows the guidelines of the medical council very closely, and also insists that recognized medical teachers be so trained. Our institute has a Medical Education Technology Cells (MET Cell) which charges the sky and conducts these courses for the employed doctors periodically. They give a book authored by its office bearers and friends as course material. I know all about it because they had taken me along as a member to conduct the courses with them, and to write one of the chapters in the book too. They had funny ways of conducting business. They would use terms like cognitive domain that always put me off - I would have preferred simple English words like thinking part. I also did not agree with the concept that a teacher had to use complex techniques to get education into students. A talented teacher just did it. Use of slide projectors, overhead projectors and LCD projectors does help, but cannot replace good old teaching with tools like blackboard and chalk. I finally resigned from the Cell because once they planned a teaching session far away from our center, and went away in a hired bus without me. I had to spend a lot of money and time getting to that center by myself. I did not mind the personal loss so much as the feeling that they did not want me, when my services were free and were offered not because I had wanted to do so but because they had dragged me there to start with. Another reason for resigning was that they had a member who was an academic bully who would ridicule any opinion other than his own, and force the Cell to accept whatever he wanted done. The office bearers resented him but could not do anything about it for reasons best not put here. The MET cell taught that medical teachers must use audiovisual aids for teaching students. The institute obtained the aids, but the department chiefs in charge of keeping those in working order often failed to do so. Finally the teachers were forced to teach without those aids. The Medical Council inspectors confirmed that the institute had all teaching aids like different types of projectors and computers in prescribed numbers. They never checked the functionality of the gadgets. I had a feeling that it was merely copying the Western educational methods without much thought to what was actually needed by our students. So I decided to take an opinion poll. After my lecture to the undergraduate students last week, I asked them if the preferred a dark auditorium with slides projected for teaching or a lighted auditorium with the teacher teaching them face-to-face maintaining eye contact. I had just taught them the latter way because I liked it that way and also because the computer and projector in that Biochem auditorium was not working as usual. “The face-to-face type” they said unanimously. I told them the MET Cell concept and the Medical Council requirements. They just shrugged their shoulders. “Why not the slides?” I asked them. “The teachers just read out the stuff on the slides, which we can also do ourselves with their books” they said. “But a teacher cannot show the photographs of patients or pathology specimens and videos of operations on a blackboard and chalk” I pointed out. “We would like those parts in slide form. But the teaching should be face-to-face” they said. “I always thought so” I said. “Now that 118 students (the number of students present that day) have confirmed it, I will communicate this thought to the MET Cell.” They were happy to hear that. I have not yet written to the MET Cell, because that will shatter the very foundation of what they profess. I can always hope they will read my blog. But whether I tell them or whether they read my blog, I wonder if they will have the courage to write to the Medical Council or the health university, or to teach their course-delegates that they should use teaching aids only for visuals, not for text. I wonder further if the trained teachers will heed this advice because it is always so much more comfortable to read text in slides than to know the stuff well enough to be able to speak it out without help of slides.