EDUCATIONAL TRENDS IN MEDICINE: COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND PEDAGOGICAL MODELS

Abstract

At present, most medical students belong to a generation raised with unlimited access to modern information and communication technologies, also named by researchers the Net-generation, Millennials, Y-generation or YouTube Generation. Collaborative internet-based applications are part of their day-to-day lives, dramatically changing how they communicate, interact or access information. This has led to a great change in how these future doctors interact with their educators, or with the learning resources and the entire medical knowledge available, resulting in a globalization of medical education and a transformation of the medical curriculum mainly due to the available e-learning solutions. In this context, medical education means not only teaching content knowledge and training specialised medical competencies, but also the diversification of teaching-learning methods and improving their efficiency through ICT, the understanding of new types of medic-patient relationships wherein the patient is empowered and informed, ensuring the active participation of students in clinical situations and case based reasoning. From a pedagogical point of view, the massive infusion of technology in education led to the shaping of new pedagogical models with the role of highlighting and explaining how technology supports, modifies and refines learning in the medical field. Examples of such pedagogical models include the Technology Pedagogy and Content Knowledge (TPACK) model and the Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition (SMAR) model. In this paper, we present educational trends and ICT based pedagogical models, highlighting the opportunities and the difficulties identified in this direction by the doctors who go through the teacher training program offered by the Teacher Training Department at the West University of Timisoara.