Perspectives: Education

Perspective:

Unlike clinical work and research (both of which I love), teaching has brought me the day to day meaning in my work. I was asked to give dedicated 8-hour lecture series to medical students at University of California, Riverside School of Medicine (my alma mater) in 2012. How was I supposed to keep students' attention for 1 hour, let alone 8 hours? As a result, I started actively learning about best practices for teaching. There are several resources which helped transform my teaching style.

The best resource for educators and learners alike is the book "Make It Stick" which provides a data-driven approach to best learning techniques such as interleaving, active recall, spacing, etc.
Harbor-UCLA (Dr Christian DeVergillio) hosts an outstanding annual Faculty and Residents As Educators which bring together educators and scientists (who study effective strategies) to learn about the latest research of learning.
For radiology faculty, ARRS hosts an outstanding Clinical Educator Development Program workshop

Most recently as of 2016, I was asked by UCR to teach Radiology didactics for the 4th year medical students. I was a fellow at the time and was 80 miles from UCR campus and thus, it was proposed that I do the lectures on a web-based platform (Zoom). All of my instruction had been done in-person up until 2016 when I started to give live online lectures. If done correctly, web-based lectures are as effective (maybe more so) than in-person lectures for these reasons:

it's more time efficient (you don't have to drive, etc etc)
students appreciate the flexibility (they can log in from anywhere)
the online platform facilitates interaction. For example, I have a few students who refuse to speak up (instead I get emails from them). With the online platform, they can text in their questions.
it's scalable. I can accommodate 1 or 100 students with no added resources.
there are online tools (Poll Everywhere), Google Slides perfectly suited for these interactions.
attendance is less of an issue. I used to get disheartened when attendance dropped after lectures were no longer required. With an online platform, it doesn't impact me as much because I can have an intimate interaction with the students (without being in an empty large lecture hall).

For educators, here are my personal thoughts:

Data points. One of my favorite quotes "You can't improve what you can't measure" is true for education. Lecturers often give their lectures and assume the audience learned it. However, most lecturers fail to measure their effectiveness at getting the materials across to the learners. My approach is to test the audience; I typically administer 20 multiple choice question pre and post quiz for every one hour of lecture. I would advocate for similar testing style to complement didactics.
Audience engagement. We have limited attention span. We know learners retain more when engaged in lecture. Incorporating audience response systems such as RSNA Live and free-software PollEv.com are simple ways to keep an audience engaged and interactive.

There following are some of my favorite resources for putting lectures together for our new generation of learners: