Impact on Learning
The use of advanced technologies in medical and surgical education has a significant impact on learning. The impact is most easily recognized in terms of access. With distributed learning technologies, such as the RSV application and others, students and other learners have easy access to unique learning resources, available in complex datasets that would not normally be available to them. With this application, students are able to dissect a fresh cadaveric hand, viewing each layer from any angle, and seeing the anatomical structure in three dimensional stereo. In many parts of the world, dissection is no longer a part of the medical school curriculum, so this opportunity to do a virtual dissection becomes even more important for students in those schools. In addition, students are able to access these learning resources 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from any location—on campus, across town, or from another city!
Sakti Srivastava discusses the value of high-bandwidth applications.
Another important way that these technologies impact learning is that they support collaborative learning. Medical education has been shifting from a curriculum based on memorization of facts, to one based on learning to solve complex medical problems. Along with this shift, there is greater emphasis on empowering students to take more responsibility for their own learning, which includes working with other students in informal study groups, and accessing an instructor, or other content expert, when they need the additional help. These advanced technologies for distributed learning support collaborative learning regardless of the location of the students or instructors.
Similarly, the impact on learning is seen at the more advanced levels in residency training and continuing medical education. Surgical education is being transformed by the introduction of simulators, both in part-task trainers and more recently networked simulators, such as SPRING, which give trainees the opportunity to work one-on-one with a master surgeons, manipulating virtual tissue and organs of the same simulated patient, even when trainee and surgeon are in different geographic locations. In continuing medical education, these new learning technologies make it possible for surgeons to watch a live surgical demonstration in three dimensional stereo, as if they had a front row seat in the operating theatre, regardless of their actual location. In addition, the introduction of haptics, or force feedback, to surgical simulators makes it possible for trainees to feel what the instructor feels, receive "hand on hand" guidance and respond to individualized instruction from a master surgeon in a distributed learning environment.
Evaluation of these technologies shows considerable acceptance in spite of technical difficulties. After a surgical learning event (SimTech, 2004) between Stanford University and surgical residents at Canberra, Australia, 100% of the residents rated the learning value of the stereo images as acceptable or better, and 97% felt that the performance of the networked application, over Internet2 and its global equivalent, was acceptable or better. Medical students at Northern Ontario School of Medicine assessed the RSV application, the images and the labeling capability as useful or better. Many suggested that their use in small group learning and teaching between students would be very useful.