Vermont Medical School Says Goodbye to Lectures
Another one bites the dust. This is a trend&#x2F;fad that will likely be reversed once properly studied.<p>My wife went to a medical school that had recently adopted so-called &quot;active learning&quot; techniques. All the students secretly hated them, but wouldn&#x27;t share this feedback with higher-ups (academic administrators) because med students, as a group, are generally rule-following, adaptable students.<p>The &quot;non-lecture&quot; format was frequently derided by students, in private settings, as &quot;Dr. Wikipedia&quot;. That is, they were learning medicine by using Google and visiting Wikipedia pages. Because they had to collaborate on their own learning materials, even though they had no background in medicine.<p>About 50% of students I knew (secretly) spent thousands of dollars on recorded medical lectures to supplement the completely ineffective class &quot;group activities&quot;, and thus did well on the tests (and USMLEs) anyway. They never reported this to professors or administrators. Again, they were &quot;working around&quot; the broken &quot;active learning&quot; system. One of the hilarious side effects of this: the supposedly &quot;objective peer-reviewed studies&quot; of this learning style won&#x27;t show score&#x2F;testing degradation -- because the students are so self-sufficient that they work around the failing format with supplemental lecture materials purchased online! Thus, they still achieve the grades they hope, and the administrators think the system is &quot;working&quot;!<p>There was, however, a very small subset of students who preferred the &quot;active learning&quot; format. Most of the time, these were students who came into med school with a stronger science background than others (e.g. had basically started studying medicine before they got there). One reason they particularly enjoyed the format: they could skip class with little effect on their grades.