Learning & Knowledge Center
The Stanford University School of Medicine is housed in a five decades old, inadequate set of classrooms for pre-clinical instruction. The school's goal of being a premier research-intensive school of medicine that improves health in the 21st century through its discoveries, leadership and innovations in education, patient care, and biomedical and clinical research, was at risk.
The Learning & Knowledge Center (LKC), scheduled for opening in early 2010, will incorporate state-of-the-art learning technologies in classroom configurations that take advantage of networked facilities. SUMMIT's leadership through the HAVnet project contributed the vision for learning spaces that enable networked visualization of media-rich anatomy, of simulations with standardized and virtual patients, surgical simulation for individual skills development, and virtual worlds for team training.
Many of these technologies were demonstrated in the Collab Room, for the benefit of the Stanford faculty advisors for the LKC. For example, the sense of 'presence' that results from sending multiple streams of uncompressed broadcast standard high definition video, audio and data transmitted over high bandwidth networks captured their enthusiam for new technologies.