The International Virtual Medical School is a new institution planning to open in 2004, that would allow people around the world to do their first two preclinical years online. Students would then do their clinical years in an associated teaching hospital.

From what I’ve read, I’m still a little skeptical, if only from my personal experience. The project has some great medical school partners in the US and in the UK, but I’ve never had much success with online courses. Maybe others learn just fine online, but it just doesn’t work for me. Jakob Nielsen reports that most of us don’t read on monitors, we skim , and even if I print out the webpages or PDFs for a course, I still don’t get as much out an online course. I’ve always run into problems with the interaction between the instructor and student; in the classroom, you can ask questions immediately, and get feedback and followup just as quickly. Online, communication just isn’t as helpful to me (maybe I’m an audial learner). No matter how great the bulletin board system, students have to post questions, the professor has to respond, the student asks a followup question, and voila, two days later, the student has another question that will take two days to answer. Plus, you have to wade through other questions, pages and pages of other comments and questions–it’s just not a viable medium–especially on the professor’s side, where they have to respond to 80 emails a day from students, or 80 messageboard posts. Even chatting is tough. Chatrooms can get noisy and messy quickly. Maybe they’ve thought of a way to get around these problems.

There are bright sides, however. I don’t think that this should be a _replacement_ for an actual medical school, but in areas of the world where medical training is rare or non-existent, this could be a godsend. In most cases, some medical education is better than none; even basics like understanding that bacteria and viruses can cause illness and disease, that different organs do different things in the body, and that wounds need to be cleaned to prevent infection–could be life-saving to those in developing countries. I also like the idea of students finding real-world connections to online course work; in one example, a sample online patient is an HIV+ drug addict, and the student needs to find resources in his or her local area to help connect the patient to local services.

Practicing medicine requires interpersonal skills as well as medical knowledge, and hopefully the IVMS has a way to foster this offline. If it can overcome some of the challenges that face online communication, I think it has the opportunity to train medical students in an entirely new way.

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