The other day I saw a MOOC advert cross my twitter stream – a MOOC on Patient Engagement Design. Interestingly enough its put on by the folks at Stanford Medicine (OK, that is probably why it crossed my Twitter stream – cause I follow Stanford Medicine).
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in June, I started blogging at http://bcbecky.com. I’ve found that I want my blog to be useful for some higher purpose. It isn’t just for me. I also want it to be useful in some way for medical education, but I’m not certain how it might be useful. I’m hoping this course will help me glean some insights into how my blog and my personal story might provide useful information for medical education.
My immediate feedback on the course is that they need to proofread their introduction text. The info in the first screen is full of typos. It doesn’t bode well for something that is intended for a large audience to include a bunch of sentences that don’t make sense. I also find it amusing that the course “will not provide a Statement of Accomplishment”. This is the first time I’ve enrolled in an xMOOC type course that doesn’t involve any form of statement of accomplishment. In addition, they say outright that the discussion forums are a place for students to interact and that we should not expect interactions from staff or course instructors (this is where they have typos as they say “You should not expectation communication from the course staff on the discussion boards”, huh?)
So, although the topic has promise, I’m not immediately encouraged by the sloppiness in the implementation. I do hope to find some useful resources and perhaps gain some deeper insight into what medical educators think it means to engage patients.
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