Thursday, June 26, 2003

eCurriculum for Radiology Residents I came across this recent article from Academic Radiology: Radiology Residency eCurriculum Developed In-House: Evaluation of Benefits and Weaknesses, from the University of Iowa. The department developed a CD-ROM chock full of information for the residents in the residency program. Here are the highlights as I see them. 20% of the residents never looked at the CD. Hmmm, not very successful. Why? The first section (and presumably the most important) was the Core Curriculum. This follows the recent trend in education emphasiziing a curriculum with goals and objectives. Pilot curriculum have been published by numerous societies and promoted by the Association of Program Directors in Radiology. In this article we find out what the end users think of this work. 94% ( it would have been 100 for the exception of 1 resident) never used the Program Directors curriculum and 60% did not use the department's internal curriculum. Maybe educators should reconsider what they are promoting. It's hard to find anything that the residents liked about the CD. The percentage who either did not use or did not find helpful individual sections ranked consistently in the 40 - 80% range. For example, 60% did not find the CD lectures useful. Again one wonders why? My presumption, not backed up by facts is the lack of audio. When asked how they learn, the residents primary resource was subspeciality texts followed by review texts. In 3rd place was department lectures and case conferences and last was the CD-ROM. The lack of success is not because residents don't know about computers. The residents had computers (22/23) and had Internet access at home (20/23). In the late 80's and early 90's, multimedia CD-ROMS were published by a wide variety of companies. Many were ravely reviewed (Voyager series) and heralded as the new wave of educating students, unfortunately they were a flop in the marketplace. Users simply do not want to acquire information from a CD. Unfortunately, the University of Iowa has rediscovered the wheel. When asked how the CD could be made more useful, the majority of residents thought it should be online. As the Interent has shown, this is the more viable medium for the dissemination of information. An Intranet site is more "portable" that is one doesn't need to have the CD-ROM in hand and has the further advantage in that it can be updated at any time. It should be noted that since they started handing out the CD-ROM, the program has expanded to 4 CD-ROMS. The poor results noted in this survey does not negate the importance of electronic media in the dissemination of information. It will work as soon as authors 1) provide the right materials (not goals and objectives) and 2) place the material in the correct electronic environment (Internet and not CD-ROM). 9:25:30 AMGoogle It!