Resident E-Learning: Podcasting Makes the Rounds at USC Medical School
Like most medical residents, Paul Sucgang regularly puts in 80-hour weeks as a third-year resident at USC's Keck School of Medicine's family practice residency program in Los Angeles. It's all part of the postgraduate training that doctors go through before becoming practicing physicians, but it leaves little time for fiddling with computers.
That's why Sucgang said he's so pleased with the
website
he's created, without any HTML knowledge at all, and the weekly podcasts of physician "grand round" lectures that he's made available through the site. As an option, residents can subscribe to the podcasts via Apple's iTunes site to have the lectures automatically downloaded to their iPods each week.
Sucgang used
Apple's iWeb
program to create the site, and and now records and broadcasts the podcasts weekly using a simple, low-cost software product called
ProfCast
, from Humble Daisy.
The effort is purely volunteer, with low cost and simplicity as major drivers. ProfCast appealed to Sucgang because of its extremely low cost compared to comparable products. "We would never have been able to do this with our budget and our limited time without the use of ProfCast," Sucgang says.
Instead of faculty or staff, residents themselves at the school of medicine spearheaded an effort last year to find a way to record the grand round lectures, in which an experienced physician lectures the resident doctors on particular subjects. Residents wanted to find a way for doctors who couldn't make it to the lectures to "attend" after the fact. They tried video but found the quality poor and the file size too large. They also discovered that what was really of interest was the audio and slides; the video was unnecessary. "We weren't really watching the grand rounds for the video," Sucgang says. "We didn't [need to watch] who was talking; we wanted the information."
While recording podcasts is a fairly simple endeavor, adding slides from Microsoft PowerPoint--or Apple Keynote--makes things a bit more complex. Without software that records where the slides are presented during the audio lecture, someone must insert them into the podcast after the fact--a time-consuming effort.