Mudança curricular

Buscando humanização, Medicina da USP reduz tempo em sala de aula

 

Quem começou medicina na USP neste ano encontrou cenário de mudança. A graduação de seis anos, considerada a melhor do país, sofreu redução de 30% no número de disciplinas, que agora são oferecidas de forma mais integrada. O curso ganhou abordagem mais humanizada, com foco no paciente.

Os novos alunos estudam conjuntamente temas que antes ficavam em gavetas separadas, caso de anatomia e histologia (estudo dos tecidos). As provas se tornaram semestrais, avaliando o conteúdo de maneira mais unificada.

Paralelamente, outros temas ganharam espaço no currículo, como "ciclos da vida", disciplina que aparece no primeiro ano do curso e dá noções de cuidados médicos na infância e terceira idade. 

Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress

Médico veste jaleco com o logo da medicina da USP no Instituto de Ortopedia e Traumatologia do Hospital das Clínicas em São Paulo.

O aluno passa menos tempo na sala de aula: se antes ficava quase oito horas por dia confinado, agora a taxa gira em torno de cinco horas.

"Com o tempo que sobra, o estudante pode se envolver em pesquisa e em trabalhos de extensão voltados ao atendimento de pacientes", diz Edmund Chada Baracat, ginecologista e docente da USP que encabeçou a mudança.

Esse tipo de currículo, mais moderno e flexível, já é seguido por escolas top do mundo há muito tempo. Nos EUA, país que concentra seis das dez melhores universidades de medicina do mundo, segundo o ranking Times Higher Education, um estudante não passa mais que três horas em aulas expositivas.

"Às vezes, um professor dá exercício em aula de manhã e os alunos têm de resolvê-lo sozinhos ou em grupos até o fim do dia", conta Ana Flávia Garcia Silva, 22. Estudante do quinto ano da USP, ela traz no currículo intercâmbios em Harvard e Michigan.

Quando esteve na primeira universidade -considerada a segunda melhor do mundo-, passou quase o tempo todo no laboratório. Ao voltar para o Brasil, teve de "repetir" um ano no curso porque não conseguiu equivalência do que estudou lá com disciplinas obrigatórias daqui. "Quando vi as mudanças no curso da USP, queria prestar vestibular de novo", brinca. 

	Editoria de Arte/Folhapress

 

BEBENDO NA FONTE

Parte das inspirações para a mudança da USP veio justamente dos EUA. Apesar de diferenças cruciais na formação educacional nos dois países, há aspectos que ainda podem ser importados.

"Aqui, a relação médico-paciente passa por disciplinas, exercícios e estudos de caso", diz Marcos Montagnini, geriatra e responsável pelo grupo de cuidados paliativos da Universidade de Michigan, uma das instituições que influenciaram a USP.

São os profissionais de paliativos que trabalham a humanização da medicina de maneira mais profunda, tratando aspectos físicos, psicológicos e espirituais de pacientes com doenças crônicas terminais. Nos EUA, a disciplina é obrigatória há mais de uma década.

Por aqui, não há essa exigência. Para Baracat, da USP, a redução da carga horária pode fazer com que os estudantes tenham tempo para se dedicar a assuntos mais humanistas, como paliativos, ainda na graduação. "Antes isso era quase impossível."

Giovanni Guido Cerri, diretor da AMB (Associação Médica Brasileira), avalia que a mudança no curso da principal universidade do país é simbólica. Dá um oportuno chacoalhão no tom em que o médico vinha sendo formado. "Mas ainda falta o estudante conhecer com mais profundidade o SUS e as características da nossa saúde pública e privada", diz. "O Brasil é complexo, e precisamos formar os médicos adequados para um país assim."

Learning how to learn

The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn

By John Markoff

The world’s most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.

“Learning How To Learn,” which was created by Barbara Oakley, an electrical engineer, and Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist, has been ranked as the leading class by enrollment in a survey of the 50 largest online courses released earlier this month by the Online Course Report website.

The course is “aimed at a broad audience of learners who wanted to improve their learning performance based on what we know about how brains learn,” said Dr. Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

With 1,192,697 students enrolled since the course was created last year, “Learning How to Learn,” which is offered by the University of California through Coursera, an online learning company which has partnered with a number of universities, has narrowly edged out the more tightly focused course, “Machine Learning,” taught by Stanford University professor Andrew Ng, which currently has 1,122,031 students enrolled.

The similar enrollment figures are striking in part because the field of machine learning has become one of the hottest university areas of study in recent years. High technology companies are competing intensely in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for newly minted data scientists.

The enrollment figures indicate that massively open online courses, or MOOCs, which in 2012 emerged as a potentially disruptive force that some believed might threaten the modern educational system, are continuing to evolve and gaining broad acceptance as part of an increasingly diverse marketplace for online education.

The Achilles heel of the MOOC phenomena has been that while enrollments have been huge, the number of students who actually complete courses for credit has remained low. That has led traditional educators to argue that the new technology would fail because students are generally less motivated to complete coursework online.

The completion rate — or “stickiness” — of the “Learning How to Learn” course has been above 20 percent, said Dr. Sejnowski, roughly twice the average for most MOOCs. He said the course is now attracting about 2,000 new students a day from 200 countries. The course was created after the two researchers met at the National Science Foundation-financed Science of Learning Center at the University of California at San Diego, which Dr. Sejnowski directs.

Dr. Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, acknowledged that although only roughly 50,000 of the more than one million enrollees in her course had actually received a certificate for the course, certification was the wrong metric to understand the impact of the new form of online education.

“People frame it incorrectly,” she said. “Students are clearly hungry to learn, and they’re particularly hungry for practically useful, scientifically based information told in a way that they can really get it.”

She is a passionate advocate of the MOOC concept against a range of academic critics. She recently wrote an essay defending online education technologies. Dr. Oakley claims there is evidence that the course has touched a nerve more broadly from a diverse audience that is eager to acquire to improve their learning skills.

She cited a range of groups who are promoting the course from the California State Prison System, federal K-12 teacher certificate programs, as well as refugee camps in Somalia and Sudan, where she asserted that students threatened to overwhelm the meager Internet bandwidth available in those countries.

There is evidence that MOOCs are being fed by a broad base of “life-long learning” interest said Merrill Cook, editor of the Online Course Report.

“Your average person taking a MOOC has a bachelors degree and is in their 30s,” he said.

He noted that there is now an increasing proliferation of a range of different online learning offerings beyond MOOCs. That can be seen in the shift in strategy in one of the earliest commercial efforts in the new approach to teaching.

Take Udacity, which was founded by Sebastian Thrun, an artificial intelligence researcher who taught at Stanford and then founded Google’s X Lab research effort. After first offering MOOCs, the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm shifted its strategy and now offers “Nanodegrees” to train online customers in very specific skills.

“If I look back at the MOOC hype, what actually happened was that people equated a cheaper delivery method with the replacement of the entire educational system,” Dr. Thrun said. “A cheaper technology is not the same as a business revolution.”

Educational Technology

EdTech and the Wider Higher Ed Conversation in 2016

By Joshua Kim

What should be the place of educational technology (edtech) in the wider higher ed conversation?

As we look to 2016, where should the edtech profession direct its focus?

I’d like to make 3 arguments for those of us working at the intersection of learning and technology to widen our perspectives, and to perhaps shift our focus to the bigger questions faced by the higher ed.

Argument 1 - Technology Is the Least Interesting Part of Higher Education:

We should always keep in mind that technology is only a tool - a means to an end. Technology is never the goal, and technology is never the destination. 

The temptation, however, is for those of us in edtech to focus most of our energies on the tools. Engaging in debates around costs, access, and quality is a messy proposition. How do we have any impact on the larger challenges in postsecondary education in an age of public funding cuts and the adjunctification of the professoriate? Where do we enter the debate around rising student debt and persistently low six-year graduation rates? Technology, with its ever improving costs/performance trajectory (Moore’s Law), seems to be a much happier place to occupy than the policy, governance, and resource debates that dominate so much of the higher ed discourse.

The answer, of course, is that technology alone will never address the fundamental challenges that we face in higher ed. Technology can wow, and technology can distract. Alternatively, technology can be an effective tool to reach our larger goals and to reflect our most important values. It all depends on how we go about using the technology. If we are to be effective in edtech, if we are to have a true positive impact, then we are going to have to become much more knowledgeable about the larger challenges facing higher ed. We will need to become as conversant in finance, marketing, and organizational change as we are in the latest educational technologies. We will need to take part in many more conversations.

Argument 2 - As EdTech Professionals, We Bring An Important Skills and Perspectives to the Larger Higher Ed Discussion:

Having said that technology is the least interesting part of higher education, I do want to argue that us technologists bring some important skills to the table. Mostly, we have the experience and the ability to create things. We will push for moving more quickly from talk to action than our colleagues may be comfortable with. We will want to develop minimally viable products (or services or programs), and then rapidly improve these initiatives as we learn from market feedback.  

We will push for both a strong set of objectives, and data to guide rapid corrections. We will be comfortable with risk. This is not just empty techno speak, but rather a reflection of the core ethos of our technology (and innovation) culture.

For those of you like myself that came up in the online learning world we have lots of experience in building new programs. Online learning gets way too little credit for its role in driving organizational change. Creating a successful online program requires the development of new pedagogical, technological, and administrative capacities. The state of the art of online learning is evolving so rapidly that innovation is constant. If you are running an online degree program (or even a few online courses) you are always iterating, experimenting, and improving. Over the last decade or so I have watched how much of what we have learned in online education has filtered into traditional residential education. The hard distinction between a fully on-ground and fully online class is eroding, as every course (and in particular larger enrollment courses) transition to a blended mode of delivery. The same methods of backwards course design, formative assessment, and design for engagement and presence that characterize a good online course also describe a good residential course. 

When will we start to see those that have developed and run online learning programs gain greater influence throughout higher ed? Will we start to see provosts and presidents with backgrounds in online education?  

Argument 3 - The Postsecondary Status Quo Is Not Sustainable, and Technology (and Technologist) Must Play an Essential Role in Driving Innovation:

The best argument I think for why the edtech profession needs to engage with the bigger issue in higher ed is that status quo cannot be sustained. We can’t keep doing what we have been doing in higher education and expect that our sector will solve our challenges around access, costs, and quality. Unlike many who are reading this post, I believe that the future of the US higher education is positive. In my professional life I have watched as the quality of teaching and learning on our campuses has improved. No longer do we find it acceptable to construct an educational approach around the transmission of information. Active learning has become a widely accepted goal. I give much of the credit to this shift to online education, both traditional and open. Any school that does not offer a learning experience better than what can be had for free and online is in deep trouble. When it comes to teaching and learning, the floor (in certain respects) has been raised. 

This does nothing to diminish the counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating disinvestments in educators that we have also witnessed in the last few decades. The smartest policy that any institution could pursue would be to invest in the security, autonomy, and compensation of faculty. A race to the educational bottom is a losing game, as low-marginal cost online platforms (adaptive learning paired with open online courses) is poised to take over the low-end of the higher ed market.

How we will move make non-linear advances in improving access, reducing costs, and investing in quality are all open questions. I believe that the edtech community needs to be part of these discussions.  In taking a leadership role we will need to find a way to make common cause with faculty of every rank. The educational technology profession has too often been on the efficiency side of the postsecondary innovation argument. We have done a poor job in making the case that education is a relational activity, and technology is only as good as it supports the work of our educators. We need to make a strong case against scaling an endeavor that is best done at a human scale. 

We will see technology mediating more of the learning process, but we should never take the focus away from providing the resources and support to the skilled and experienced educators that create the real value in education. A focus on supporting our educators is, I think, the place that the edtech profession should start as we seek to lead change in higher education. My strong hope is that 2016 is the year that we earn the trust of our faculty colleagues.

How do you think that the edtech profession should engage in the wider higher ed conversation in 2016?

Nanomedicine

Nanomedicine concepts in the general medical curriculum: initiating a discussion

Sweeney AE  

Abstract: Various applications of nanoscale science to the field of medicine have resulted in the ongoing development of the subfield of nanomedicine. Within the past several years, there has been a concurrent proliferation of academic journals, textbooks, and other professional literature addressing fundamental basic science research and seminal clinical developments in nanomedicine. Additionally, there is now broad consensus among medical researchers and practitioners that along with personalized medicine and regenerative medicine, nanomedicine is likely to revolutionize our definitions of what constitutes human disease and its treatment. In light of these developments, incorporation of key nanomedicine concepts into the general medical curriculum ought to be considered. Here, I offer for consideration five key nanomedicine concepts, along with suggestions regarding the manner in which they might be incorporated effectively into the general medical curriculum. Related curricular issues and implications for medical education also are presented.
Keywords: medical education, basic science, teaching, learning, assessment, nanoscience curriculum, nanomedicine concepts

 

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