case KM III (Tuff University)
A Big Bang for Education
Talk about a KM explosion at Tufts. Although there is little quantitative evidence so far that the system is directly improving students’ comprehension or increasing exam scores, anecdotal evidence abounds that the project is creating value. Lee says students report they’re learning material faster and more easily. Faculty say that lectures have become more interactive. The system also seems to be transforming traditional, didactic medical education at Tufts into a model of self-directed study more common in other graduate school programs. “That’s what’s so exciting about this,” says Anthony Schwartz, associate dean for academic and outreach programs at the veterinary school. “Students learn best when you provide them with this kind of structure—with links to where you would like them to go—and then turn them loose. They’re not only going to learn what they need to get through school, but they’re going to explore areas they couldn’t otherwise.”
Tufts is the only health sciences school in the country that has integrated its curricula so that students can transcend course-, discipline- and profession-specific boundaries. “The interdisciplinary implications of this system are very powerful,” Schwartz says. For example, medical students studying salmonella in humans can link to veterinary school material to learn about the source of the bacteria, its effect on chickens and cattle, ways it is transmitted to humans, prevention and treatment. “These kinds of concepts can be taught not by new courses, but by cross-disciplinary linkages so that students have a direct understanding,” he adds.
More than 100,000 connections between courses and atoms of content within the system help students understand. Because the data is entered in Lego-block-like chunks, changing or updating course material is much easier than manually re-creating entire courses on paper. “If you’re teaching Shakespeare, you don’t have to worry about Shakespeare becoming obsolete,” Metz says. “But medical and science [information] could have a short half-life, so that when it’s time to update course material, it makes sense to do so in a modular, digital form.”
The beauty of the database is its flexibility, says Lee. “The model allows you to take chunks of information, manipulate it, reuse it and put it together in a way that suits your own unique needs. I think that’s what’s going to be so attractive to other schools.”
Dozens of universities from as far away as South Africa have visited Tufts to see demonstrations of the system and its potential applications for medical education. The AAMC is exploring the idea of creating a national database of health sciences information, which would be available to all U.S. medical schools, based on Tufts’ system. “It doesn’t make any sense to have every medical school in the country replicate this,” says Dr. Michael E. Whitcomb, senior vice president of the division of medical education, AAMC. “If we could develop something that all medical schools could use, it would be a tremendous advantage.”
Eaton, Lee and Metz are thrilled that what began as a grassroots effort may benefit not only Tufts, but also the greater scientific community. “Part of our mission is to go beyond what we do on our campus and to make a contribution to the world,” says Metz. “So we’re very committed to the beginnings of a movement to use the system as a national model. It’s part of what our mission is about.”
Bullitt, who is in the middle of a clinical rotation in adult internal medicine this semester, continues to rely on the Health Sciences Database website for long-distance learning—and to cure any future spells of medical student amnesia. Even after she graduates in 2002, she and other Tufts graduates can continue to use the system if they are staff members at any of Tufts’ affiliated institutions. One of the most important lessons she has learned at Tufts, she says, is how to use technology as a tool to continue her education—a lifelong task for medical professionals.
“That’s the world we live in,” she says. “You take what you’ve learned from your education and constantly add to it, and it’s nice to build that habit now. This system isn’t going to be a textbook I’m going to throw out in a couple of years because it’s no longer accurate. It’s always evolving.”
© 2008 CXO Media Inc.
