This webinar will look at the International Virtual Medical School (IVIMEDS), an ambitious collaboration in medical education, which launched in 2002 but that ultimately did not realise its ambition. Ten years on some of those ambitions are now being met by new initiatives made possible by new technologies and perhaps IVIMEDS was an idea ahead of it time.
Medical schools from around the world joined forces to form IVIMEDS, a partnership aimed at sharing online medical education learning resources. IVIMEDS also aspired to potentially deliver elements of the early years of medical curriculum online. However, limited numbers of resources were shared between the members and the IVIMEDS vision wasn’t realised due to barriers around sharing, the level of member participation and the available technologies.
In 2013 massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become the buzzword in higher education as US universities have established Coursera, Udacity and EdX. Medical Schools are beginning to offer MOOCs in different areas of medicine and it’s likely that others will follow suit. Alongside MOOCs medical schools are also sharing open educational resources (OERs) via repositories such as MedEdPortal. The use of social media is also making the creation and sharing of online medical education easier and the free open access medical education (FOAMed) movement is attracting a growing audience. Social media tools such as blogs and Twitter and sites such as YouTube and Vimeo make content creation and sharing ever easier and a new level of online participatory medical education is emerging.
Natalie Lafferty is Lecturer in eLearning and eLearning lead for the College of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing at the University of Dundee. She also leads the Technology and Innovation in Learning Team, which supports clinical teachers to apply technology to enhance and support teaching and learning in the undergraduate medical curriculum. Previously she was the Chief Operations Officer for the International Virtual Medical School collaboration in elearning in medical education and worked at the Centre for Medical Education in Dundee.