Distributed Learning Expands Med School's Reach

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Distributed Learning Expands Med School's Reach

9/12/2007

By Linda L Briggs

A shortage of physicians in rural areas isn't a problem unique to Canada, but the highly sophisticated technology solution that the University of British Columbia has set up to solve it may well be.

The university, located in Vancouver, faced a challenge as the only medical school in the vast and largely rural province of British Columbia. UBC's medical school was producing just a third of the 400 new doctors needed yearly to meet the province's need. And because physicians tend to set up practices where they graduate, few of those doctors were settling in the rural areas that needed them most.

To both increase the number of doctors it was graduating, and to encourage more doctors to settle in non-urban areas, UBC decided to partner with two rural universities that were also on or near the west coast of Canada, though difficult to reach from Vancouver: The University of Victoria, located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off the West coast of Canada, and the University of Northern British Columbia, whose core campus is in the town of Prince George in the northern inland area of the province.

Clearly, the cost to shuttle instructors, most of whom are doctors themselves, from campus to campus on a rotating teaching schedule would be prohibitive, and difficult or impossible during bad weather. Instead, UBC decided on a complex distributed learning solution that uses audio and video in sophisticated ways to bring not just the instructor and presentation materials, but the students themselves, into audio and video contact with each other during classes.

According to Michael Keating, associate director of technology for faculty of medicine at UBC, the university will add a final 32 students to the program in 2007, accomplishing its goal two years ahead of time of doubling the number of medical students graduated yearly.

While the university's overall investment in the system is difficult to calculate because each university built its own facilities, Keating said, the cost was in "the multiple millions [of Canadian dollars]." However, given the requirements of the three universities, he said, "I would say that we put together a solution to meet the requirements in the most cost-effective way."

In its essence, the distributed learning system sends courses taught at UBC to the other two sites in real time, using an IP-based videoconferencing system over a university-owned, high-bandwidth network. If an instructor is located in Victoria or Prince George, the content can also be distributed from there. In addition, more than one classroom can participate in an A/V session at one time. All three sites have complex A/V systems in the several classrooms that are set up as part of the system. Contents of the classroom include a number of cameras and microphones, as well as ancillary A/V devices to capture sound, and a suite of DVD players, audio tape players, VCRs, and document cameras, used by instructors for showing three-dimensional objects, such as a medical specimen, in high detail.