UBC med student blog: Teaching and technology in medicine: Too much information?

Blog Author: Andrew Provan

When we think of how technology has transformed medicine, we might think of MRI machines or DNA sequencing. We probably don’t think of how technology has transformed the teaching of medicine. Lectures given in medical school, as in most other disciplines, look a lot different than they did 20 years ago.

The chalk board and the overhead projector have been supplanted by the PowerPoint presentation, which is now the tool of choice for the vast majority of lecturers in medical school. Has this been a good change? Well, there are certainly benefits: to begin with, PowerPoint slides are aesthetically pleasing and easier to read than handwriting.

Secondly, lecturers can organize their presentations beforehand, so that during their lecture they can just click through their slides with ease. Unfortunately, there’s a trap here that a lot of lecturers fall into: presenting too much information. It’s so easy to click through 50 or 60 slides in an hour that lecturers run the risk of overwhelming the students and losing their attention.

Students only have the capacity to absorb so much material, and I suspect this capacity is often overestimated. If a lecturer can teach a student three things in one hour, they’ve done very well. I can recall too many well-meaning, enthusiastic lecturers who, by trying to teach 100 things in 1 hour, ended up teaching nothing at all. No one should feel the pressure to teach 100 things or get through 60 slides. Students can read the lecturers’ detailed notes on their own time.

What’s most important is for the lecturers to provide a framework for their notes by emphasizing the fundamental points. If they can communicate the key concepts of the topic during their lecture, they’ve accomplished their task of providing a good foundation for further study.

To ensure these key points are heard and understood by students in a lecture setting, repetition is an invaluable tool. If a lecturer says something once, some students absorb it. If they say it twice, most students absorb it. If they say it three times, slowly and with emphasis, everyone absorbs it.

I admire the courage of all who lecture in front of hundreds of medical students. The best lecturers, however, are those who resist the temptation to present too much information and instead use their limited time to lay out a basic yet robust foundation for the topic.
--Andrew Provan
Class of 2013

The BCMJ invites UBC med students to submit blog entries for our med student blog contest until 25 October. The best entry wins $250! Contest details here. Good luck!