Making Room for More Physicians (continued)

By Darla Brown

Physical resources

Expanding class sizes takes physical resources. The University of Texas Medical School at Houston was constructed in three phases and completed in 1978. Tropical Storm Allison, which hit the school in 2001, afforded administrators and architects the opportunity to rethink space planning, keeping future class sizes in mind, which started off at a mere 19 in 1970.

Over the last couple of years, the Medical School's large lecture halls have undergone makeovers with new fabrics, sound, projection and lighting systems. To make room for more students, permanent seating has been removed in some rooms, allowing for "sled-based" chairs without arms – increasing capacity by 50 per room.

"We also are looking at installing electrical feeds under the carpet so students may charge their laptops during lectures," says Claire Brunson, director of management services, adding that this will keep students attuned to the mounting technological resources available.

More chairs are on order for the pathology lab, she adds.

One area that was rebuilt to accommodate a growing class size was the Learning Resource Center – a study center for students and a place where they can check out DVD and high-tech learning aids.

"The LRC was originally designed for 250 students because we had interest from the Dental Branch and the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences," explains Karim Marani, director of the LRC. "But it turns out we do not have much utilization from the students of other schools, so it has worked well in accommodating a larger Medical School class size."

The 24-hour facility is 11,000 square feet – compared to the pre-Allison space that was 7,500 square feet.

The budget for materials and resources, such as instructional texts, DVDs, and anatomical devices, which the LRC makes available to students, is based on the number of students enrolled. "Therefore, we are ready to acquire additional resources with the influx of more students," Marani adds.

The LRC offers Internet connection in all study carrels and a robust wireless system.

"We also have six problem-based learning rooms, which are used to capacity, although through creative scheduling, we could increase the utilization of these," he adds.

Straight to video

It's having control over one's schedule that makes video learning so attractive to Medical School students these days. For the last five years, medical lectures have been made available to students online. So, they can view the class, see the slides or the PowerPoint show, hear the questions at home, or in the park, or in the library on their own schedule.

"This started in the 1970s, when we began offering audiotapes of lectures and then videotapes of lectures in 1989 that students could check out," recalls Steve Fath, Ph.D., head of the UTH interactive video department. The first online audio of lectures was made available in 1996 – long before iTunes – and online videos of courses were at the ready in 1999.

But now the technology is more advanced – students can watch most all of the first and second-year courses online, and they can download lectures in seven ways, including listening to it on their iPod; they can see not just one screen on their computer but with new technology called Apreso it is on three screens, including an up-close shot of the course material on which the instructor can interactively "write" with a stylus.

"The technology is supporting an alternate way of getting the learning material out to students in ways that they want to learn," Dr. Fath says. "The technology will continue to get cheaper, and we want to expand our reach so that we will be able to capture all lectures, including all grand rounds."

(To view grand rounds and other special lectures that do not require a user name and password, see www.uth.tmc.edu/schools/video).

Dr. Fath says that offering lectures via the Web and MP3 players is serving students' needs for learning in varying modalities.

"Students learn on their own more and are much more interested in learning at their own pace and in their own way," Dr. Fath says. "I think video has taken off so much because when we were in school, everything was print-bound and now it is multimodal – there are people who learn well from print, people who learn from listening, those from seeing, and those from touching, and from a various combination of these. An ideal educational system would include as many as those that are important for a subject matter. Our new Apreso system is a learning resource that offers students support in different formats if they didn't get it in class."

And with the city and Texas Medical Center challenges of commuting and parking, does that mean less students in the classroom and more in their own environments listening to and watching a lecture via the Web or while jogging?

"Providing such technology is a logical solution to the classroom space challenge that the Medical School is facing," Dr. Fath says. "We have trouble finding time to maintain our system to bring it offline because we'll disrupt someone – students are studying at all times of the day, many students are getting all or part of the lecture material from video, and we have people viewing the grand rounds from as far away as Russia and Iraq."