What Can Medical Education Learn From Facebook and Netflix?

Shiv M. Gaglani, BA, and M. Ryan Haynes  in an article in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The title may raise hackles, but they are more right than wrong. One of the problems with the one-to-many lecture dominated undergraduate model, with minimal repeated contact between staff and students, is that feedback both for students and staff is scarce. The importance of feedback to staff  (and I do not mean the silly popularity charts) is often forgotten in the usually justified critiques of lack of (student) feedback.

Many students, in some cases as many as 80% (3), choose re- corded lectures over live ones because they can be paused, rewound, and played at various speeds. This generates data that may be used to create heat maps of individual lectures. Suppose 50 students watch a recorded lecture and 30 of them pause and rewind the video at time point 28:30. It would be statistically possible to infer that the concept being discussed at this point was unclear, and the professor involved could be notified with actionable insights…..

For example, if a student spends more time on average viewing documents in the neurology versus the cardiology block, it can be inferred that she is either more interested in or confused by the former’s subject material.

They also have some useful things to say about the limitations of learning management systems (sic)