Interview with Dr C – excerpts and analysis

The following are excerpts from my interview with Dr S. She is a maternal fetal medicine specialist and an associate professor at the University of Alberta. She has been teaching for 14 years. On the left, you will find the interview excerpts and on the right will be my reflections based on the responses.

How have you integrated technology into your teaching activities?
I am interested in trying to keep update with technology and have been trying to be enthusiastic adopter. However, I do feel that I am sort of a luddite. I mostly use PowerPoint or film. I have also tried blended learning, but this is difficult for didactic sessions because it requires students to allocate extra time for them to prepare for blended learning environment to be successful. I have recently started exploring use of whiteboard technology and do YouTube videos to incorporate that type of technology to teaching but it is still in the fetal stage of development.
Examining Dr C’s response, it highlights that the use of technology in medical education, at least at the undergraduate level is quite limited. A lot of it is still passive learning, where the students just listen to the instructor, though technology has allowed a variety in the medium that this information is delivered. Blended learning, in principle, does incorporate some active learning, but she has identified some challenges with it. It makes me wonder if we need to expand our minds a little bit and stop confining ourselves to the traditional “lecture theatre”.
What has been the impact on both yourself as well as your learners, of integrating technology into teaching activities?
I feel that there hasn’t been much of an impact. This is because the technology that I have been using has been around for a long time. I have made some of my PowerPoint lectures into Vodcast format and the feedback has been mixed. I have tried to make it interactive by having worksheets that they can fill in as they follow along and again the feedback has been mixed. I feel that it is learner dependent on whether they prefer that format versus a person physically there talking to them the whole lecture. And that’s the only feedback I have gotten on the technologies I have used.
It seems to me that Dr C is a little frustrated at the current situation. But the lack of positive feedback could be attributed to the fact that besides the medium, the way knowledge is acquired is not any different. The information is still delivered in a linear fashion, from teacher to student. This is a very knowledge-centred method of teaching and learning

 What kind of challenges have you encountered while integrating technology into your teaching, and how did you or do you plan to overcome these challenges?

My main challenge is time. I’m a very busy clinician and the patient practice sometimes makes it difficult to coordinate time to learn some of the new technologies. I think the other barrier is the geographic separation of our department from the main teaching site in our city.

 Dr C identified two challenges for her in regards to integrating tech into her teaching, which were time and geographical separation from the main teaching site. One solution would be for some of the faculty development on tech and learning to be offered via online modules or with the use of other elearning modalities that are independent of time and location. There is definitely room for improvement in this regard.

Can you elaborate on how you think technology could actually enhance learning?

I think there’s a lot of information to cover in a short amount of time. If you could have them review some of the concepts, and you can have a mixed bag of how you provide that content, I think if they could do that ahead of time, you aren’t starting from zero when introducing or doing a topic. I think that’s one way that technology can enhance learning. Things like vodcasts can enhance learning, as people learn in different ways. Some people are auditory learners some people are visual learners, so for those individuals who are auditory learners being able to hear someone explaining the concepts and doing it at their own pace does enhance their learning

 Dr C concentrates on delivering information using different media to accommodate student learning differences. But in my opinion it is still very knowledge-centred as opposed to learner-centred, with minimal use of active learning strategies. Can this really lead to deeper level of understanding? I think in these cases, we are underutilizing technology.
 When you decide to integrate technology, what are your main goals?
My main goals are to make it interesting and to make it in a format that maybe the learners more used to learning from. So I think sometimes just learning material without any extra visuals or examples or other types of technology can make it maybe not so exciting to learn. And maybe easier concepts to be embedded if could anchor them with a particular symbol or particular examples.
 Again, Dr C uses technology to represent information in different formats, but this use of technology is still very knowledge-centred.

I had a few more questions I asked but due to word count limitations, I will stop at the above. The interview highlighted to me that use of technology in large medical school classes is limited in terms of active learning and constructivist strategies. I would like to further explore how technology could be used more effectively in the large class setting, to promote a greater degree of active learning. Similar to many of my peers in this class, time commitment to learn new technologies is highlighted during my interview. Another area to explore would be faculty development in these areas and how it could be improved to help educators with e-tech integration and use.

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