A new perspective on Stanford’s ANES MOOCs #medx

I had known for months that my friend Anne Marie was coming to Stanford for something. We met at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME) in Ottawa last April. We exchanged pleasantries over Twitter and planned to meet up for dinner after her lecture. Since her and her husband were going to be in town for a short vacation, my husband and I played tour guide for a day and showed them the California coast and some of the huge ancient trees in the Santa Cruz mountains (two of my favourite parts of California).

She presented on Thursday, and as it turned out I was going to be at Stanford that day for my last chemo treatment. I asked if, per chance, we could sit in on the lecture. I had no idea at the time, that the lecture was being live streamed and recorded for the course and MOOC ANES204 Medical Education in the New Millennium (Storify below).

Being part of the “live studio audience” and watching the presentations being recorded was interesting. It really helped me to better appreciate the limitations that went into the presentations for ANES205 Patient Engagement Design.

In this particular lecture, Anne Marie talked about networked eduction and the need for collaboration to provide deep learning. Not that you cannot learn by listening to lectures, just that deeper learning occurs when you have a way to participate in knowledge creation. It was not lost on me, that the enforced lecture format meant that there was no collaboration and did not provide an opportunity for those in the room to participate in any way other than passive listening (although I did some live tweeting at the time).

What I did see, was that these courses were a live stream of a seminar course at Stanford. Nothing was added (or very little anyways) to make the course any different than the face-to-face lecture. It certainly helped me better appreciate what the goals of the team creating the MOOC were. They were not curating the ‘best’ content on the web to teach the class, rather they were mimicking the exact lecture that occurs in the course – with all the limitations associated with delivering a face-to-face class.