Finding good free materials for teaching within the framework of my field is difficult. I teach in emergency care. I need pictures / films as an illustration for presentations or as a starting point in scenario used in seminars or examinations. Pictures/films that show different types of injury’s, cooperation at the scene of the accident, etc. Much can be found online but far from everything is free to use.
What do you do? Become a producer: Often with small funds; own mobile camera, borrowed equipment and different types of props stage what we want to illustrate. Then we get to act as photo models, photographer, injured ourselves.
Here you will see:
Here we illustrate techniques to stop a bleeding
How does a trauma team work? In the absence of a volunteer, the teacher dose the job!
Being a producer today is quite simple. In the technical development, you go a long way with small funds in producing good materials for a reasonable cost.
Collaborating between several organizations / educations in both producing but also using the same material in different contexts is important. A part of my teaching time is also spent I search for good material through contacts with other organizations and universities: What do you have that is good and interesting? Lectures, visual material, etc. Then in all simplicity exchange.
Furthermore, the exchange does not have to be limited to ”transfer” of knowledge or to only share images/text/lectures. But also include the exchange of clinical experiences in collaborative forms. For example, interprofessional zoom-seminars. Many clinical situations linked to specific conditions or accidents are relatively uncommon where an exchange of experience can strengthen both an individual clinician but also an organization (Chan, et al. 2015, Wang et al. 2020). Herein lies the great challenge and the next step. When soon ”everything” is available online in the form of lectures / text etc. What’s left? No one will visit a university to receive a specific lecture or use the library’s resources. All good material will be available in several different versions online. The answer is that the core of the learning process remains: Assimilation and not just knowledge transfer. So our job is to produce and share, find good materials and build an learning environment of student-active teaching methods.
I have been inspired by Professor Mazur’s techniques of building collaborative learning. In digital form, I embed questions in my recorded lectures, build collaborative tasks in preparation for clinical sessions. If you have a few minutes left, listen to his teaching philosophy:
Peer Instruction for Active Learning – Eric Mazur – YouTube
Chan, T. M., Thoma, B., & Lin, M. (2015). Creating, curating, and sharing online faculty development resources: the medical education in cases series experience. Academic Medicine, 90(6), 785-789.
Wang, P., Zhou, L., Mu, D., Zhang, D., & Shao, Q. (2020). What makes clinical documents helpful and engaging? An empirical investigation of experience sharing in an online medical community. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 143, 104273.
