New Learners

Medical Education Blog

The new generation of learners

"Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures" - Dr. B. Berry, Baylor College of Medicine.

According to Marc Prensky, http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp in his article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, children born in North America after 1985 are radically different from the previous generations because they have always had digital resources in their homes and schools, they are native speakers of technology. To these digital natives instantaneous global access to people and resources has always been available at the click of a mouse; music has always been personally portable/shareable; photographs and video are for sharing with friends and relatives. In other words, vast amounts of information are instantly available in multimodal and frequently interactive formats.

To quote Marc "Educators have slid into the 21st century—and into the digital age—still doing a great many things the old way. It's time for education leaders to raise their heads above the daily grind and observe the new landscape that's emerging. Recognizing and analyzing its characteristics will help define the education leadership with which we should be providing our students, both now and in the coming decades."

According to Susan El-Shamy in her book Training for the new and emerging generations, digital natives learn differently. They need:

1. fast paced, highly stimulating presentations
2. increased interactivity with the content and each other
3. information that relates to the learner’s world
4. multiple options for obtaining knowledge.

Medical education can respond to the needs of these students by increasing the amount of :

• multimodal content (graphic, auditory, hands on)
• active learning (read, write, discuss)
• experiential/contextual learning (job shadowing, simulation labs)
• problem based learning, team projects.

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