Poster

Presentation Title:

Use of "Live" Online Conferencing for Medical Education

Presenter(s):

Dr. James M. Neill and Mr. Greg Conyers

SUNY-HSC at Brooklyn, New York

Abstract:

USE OF "LIVE" ONLINE CONFERENCING FOR MEDICAL EDUCATION. Anatomy students desire regular review sessions with faculty. Often, however, there is little time for them during normal working hours, and it is often difficult for faculty and students to return to the school to run such sessions during evening or weekend hours. One solution which we have explored is to utilize conferencing software to link various participants at different locations for review sessions. Our guidelines for selecting conferencing software are 1) it should be easy to install and use, 2) it should be available for both Mac and PC platforms; 3) it should be available for installation on home machines as well as school networks; 4) it should not require too much hardware (alot of memory, fast modem connections, etc) to run; and 5) it should allow the reasonably fast exchange of visual images as well as text. Using these guidelines we chose the ³Roundtable 2.0² software by ForeFront Group, Inc for our pilot program. A central ³conference location² was installed on a school server; this location houses a conference ³whiteboard area² which can be left blank, or which can be preloaded with selected images by the conference moderator. Students can use the school network to log in to the conference or they can install the client software and dial up from their home computers. At a prearranged time, the moderator logs in (via a standard Internet ISP connection from home) and is available to answer questions posed from conference participants into a ³chat box² viewable to all participants. Moderators can use standard drawing tools on the whiteboard area to illustrate various anatomical points, or they can manipulate the preloaded images with highlighter, pointer, etc. A transcript of the conference can be saved for later printing, review or posting. Although there are some differences between reviews conducted in person and online (speed of answers, qeueing of questions) positive feedback indicates the realistic application of this technology promises to enable teaching events to occur which would not normally take place.

Benefit in Attending Session:

participants will benefit from our overview of the advantages and disadvantages of live online confernecing using images and text versus email or bullitin boards for teaching. We will review the current conferencing software and go over some possible pitfalls to avoid.

PRIMARY AUTHOR'S INFORMATION

James M. Neill, Ph.D

Dept of Anatomy and Cell Biology

SUNY Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn

450 Clarkson Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11203

Telephone Number:

718-270-1025

Fax Number:

718-270-3732

E-mail Address:

jneill@netmail.hscbklyn.edu

CO-AUTHORS' INFORMATION

Mr. Greg Conyers

Office of Educational Computing

SUNY Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn

450 Clarkson Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11203

Telephone Number(s):

718-270-7416

Fax Number(s):

E-mail Address(es):

gconyers@netmail.hscbklyn.edu