Shashidhar Venkatesh Murthy¹
Ramnarayan Komatil²
1 College of Medicine, James Cook University
2 Manipal University, India

Faced by the challenges of teaching a complex skill intensive subject to medical students placed in remote clinical rotations with limited staff & resources, motivated me to create a unique teaching method that is student-centered, Integrated clinical-pathology curriculum, and technology-enhanced delivery with exceptional continuous student feedback and support. The system has been developed, implemented, and tested over two decades at James Cook University, a rural medical school in regional north Queensland of Australia. 

This work summarised in seven innovative approaches will be presented with live demonstrations. 

1: New clinically integrated clinical-pathology curriculum.
 2: Interactive remote teaching with built-in assessment & follow-up.
 3: Digital gross & microscopy tutorials with remote any-time access.
 4: Electronic & remote student response system with instant feedback.
 5: Multi-mode student support system. “professor in the pocket”.
 6: Competency-based, clinical-pathology review sessions by a multi-disciplinary team. 7: “Winners Club” based on “Technology Enhanced-Cognitive-Scaffolding” 

Together, these integrated approaches in the pathology course have resulted in significant improvements in student motivation, performance, and satisfaction. Since the implementation of innovations, average class performance has significantly improved with positive feedback from not only students but also hospital clinicians. Student performance at final examinations has increased significantly confirming the success of innovations. 

Challenges have always motivated us to innovate. The past bitter experience of learning pathology had given me ideas to improve pathology teaching. Still, the further challenge of teaching pathology to over 90 senior clinical students in remote locations motivated me to try several innovations. 

Now after 19 years, we have a robust pathology teaching remotely delivered with continuous student monitoring & student support by committed multidisciplinary staff. This oral presentation summarizes nearly two decades of my experience as an academic pathologist teaching over 220 medical students per year. 

References (maximum three) 

1. Sundram Sivamalai, Shashidhar Venkatesh Murthy, et.al, “Teaching pathology via online digital microscopy: Positive learning outcomes for rurally based medical students”. Aust. J. Rural Health (2011)