First Experience with an Audience Response System in a Russian Medical School

Oleg Medvedev, Alexey Prokhorov, Vjacheslav Kilimnik, Stanislav Korukhov, and Natalia Medvedeva, School of Medicine, Moscow State University and St. Petersburg Academy of Avionics, Russia

Didactic lecturing for big numbers of students is still dominating during teaching medical students all over the Russia.In order to develop more interactive manner of lectures we were motivated to develop hardware and software for implementation of audience response system (ARS) in russian medical curriculum. The ARS collects responses from the audience so that questions may be asked and the responses analyzed and displayed. The system promotes discussion, measures audience comprehension, gathers key information, increases the ability to remember key points, and let the participants express their opinions.According to Mark Merritt (Presentations, 2000, 4, 86-89) the systems allow opinions and guidelines for medical procedures to be produced instantly. The tips for using ARS in medical education were published recently by L. Robertson in Medical Teacher (2000, vol.22, No 3, p.237-239).

Unfortunately, commercially available ARS are quite expensive for Russian medical educators and this fact served as the main stimulus to develop our own ARS. Group of electronic engineers from St. Peterburg and medical educators from Moscow have developed the hardware and software for the ARS. The software allows the use of multimedia information in question area -text, images, animations, audio and video. Touch-sensitive numeric keypads, the computer interface controller and the software will be demonstrated with the examples of multimedia questions in physiology and pharmacology.

Presentation would be of benefit to the participants because:

• they will be informed about inexpensive audience response system
• they can discuss the advantages of using ARS in medical education for increasing interactivity of lectures and seminars
• the ways to increase the effectiveness of ARS in medical education will be discussed

Oleg Medvedev
School of Medicine,
Lomonosov Moscow State University,
Lomonosovsky Ave. 31, Bldg. 5
Phone: 7-095-932-9832
Fax: 7-095-932-9832
Email: medvedev@fbm.msu.ru
Website: http://www.fbm.msu.ru

CO-AUTHORS:

Alexey Prokhorov
Stanislav Korukhov
Natalia Medvedeva
Vjacheslav Kilimnik
School of Medicine,
Lomonosov Moscow State University,
Lomonosovsky Ave. 31, Bldg. 5
Phone: 7-095-932-9912
Fax: 7-095-932-9832
Email: alexis@fbm.msu.ru
Website: www.fbm.msu.ru