Distance Learning in Medical School? — Pathology Prof Shows How

Distance learning in medical school?  Study pathology online from 1,000 miles away?

My friend John Minarcik, MD, is double-boarded in pathology and nuclear medicine.  He’s an internet-savvy guy who saw a need for sharing information about tumors worldwide, and started the first online Tumor Board.

Recently, he decided to use free video creation software to create an entire medical school class in pathology.  Also he’s got over 800 pathology videos on YouTube.  And for his next trick, he’s using free internet meeting software to teach medical students across the world.

2010 Update:  GoPath Diagnostics Physicians Launch the World’s First Fully Online Medical School Course

“My dream had been to broadcast pathology lectures, pathology microscopic slides, and to host discussions all over the world using standard free software and standard home internet connections. That dream was realized in the fall of 2009. I was asked by Dr. Dan Harrington of Destiny University Medical School in St. Lucia to teach a pathology course geared for them, from Chicago.”

Free Online Classroom Software, Procedures and Operations

He uses a free website called Dimdim to create unlimited international online presentations.  “What I am the most proud of,” says John, “and this may be unique to pathology, is that I discovered a way to put all of my pathology slides under the virtual microscope and project for each individual student simultaneously and easily. This is akin to every student feeling he is being personally tutored by sitting down with the pathologist over his office microscope.”

To make this work, the student with the greatest band width hosts the audio portion of the lecture and lab sessions by virtue of using the Skype®² software.  The pathologist professor controls the video portion using Dimdim. This method enables a large number of students, perhaps at least 10 or 20 or more, to enter a pathology classroom and lab as long as the following conditions are satisfied:

Each student:

• is familiar with Skype.
• has a broadband hard wired Internet connection, not WiFi.
• mutes his microphone except when he is speaking
• uses the Microsoft® or Firefox® browser, not Chrome®.
• must give his Skype address to the student who is hosting the   audio BEFORE the session starts.

After the professor has successfully established a Dimdim session, and all of the students have entered the classroom, as long as he has selected the “computer screen” option, at that point, anything which is displayed on his screen will be seen by all of his student attendees. He can show his power point presentation in any way he prefers, and he can display his pathology slides as well.

For online viewers, John recommends the pathologist zooms in on huge FPX³ image files, obtained free from the University of Iowa, and displays these files with the offline LivePix 2.0 Deluxe® viewer, also obtained free.  He can then display and zoom in on his pathology slides.  This way, each student feels he or she is peeping into the pathologist’s microscope while the pathologist is explaining the slides and pointing things out.

Full procedures for online course operations are summarized at this link.

Online Teaching Advantages

John reports that students very strongly prefer the virtual pathology classroom and laboratory to the real classroom and the labs. The advantages are:

1)    All students can hear the professor just as clearly as though they were sitting right next to him in front of his computer and microscope.

2)    All students can hear each other well.

3)    The professor can hear all of his students with crystal clarity also.

4)    Every student can see the tiniest detail on every PowerPoint®.

5)    Every student can Google®, Wiki®, or chat with colleagues during the presentation without disturbing others, either as a group, or one on one.

6)    Every student feels personally tutored as though he was sitting with the pathologist one-on-one, at his microscope.

John Minarcik, MD

Professor’s Joys

Due to local medical school requirements, John will teach three out of the 16 weeks of the course personally in the Caribbean.  But in sum, John says, “I can never go back to teaching pathology in a real classroom, because this is inferior education.  And the 3-week stint in the Caribbean in December may sound like a pretty tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

His joys are knowing that:

• online pathology courses are vastly superior to real warm body lectures and real laboratories, in the real world.
• Medical schools will soon have to recognize that online courses are better, 10 times cheaper, because students are ALREADY showing massive class absenteeism and using online resources
• Offshore and third world medical schools can finally have the benefits of independent, USA-level professors.