The first medical school in the UK adds Google Glass to curriculum

The first medical school in the UK adds Google Glass to curriculum

Queen Mary University of London’s (QMUL) Medical School – Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry is the first British medical school to include Google Glass into its undergraduate curriculum, primarily within surgical teaching.

By embedding Google Glass into the curriculum, students will have access to cutting edge technology and an enhanced learning experience. This will be the most technologically advanced module in the undergraduate curriculum, bringing along a number of benefits for the students, including: watching live surgery on mobile devices, laptops and computers; interaction with surgeons during procedures, such as asking them questions, without compromising the safety of the procedure; learning basic surgical and clinical skills remotely using the streaming platform Virtual Medics.

The medical school aims to analyze other areas of the curriculum which could be modernized and enhanced by integrating this technology. The idea is to establish itself as a centre of excellence for using Google Glass in medical education and training, eventually helping other medical schools who are interested in using the platform.

This will be the most technologically advanced module in the undergraduate curriculum.“Harnessing this technology really shows our medical school is both ready for, and supportive of, new ideas for teaching and learning,” said Mr Shafi Ahmed, Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer in Surgery at Queen Mary University of London and Director of Virtual Medics. “We are starting out by using Google Glass for surgical teaching, but our long-term aim is to roll it out in other aspects of the school.

Earlier this year, a group of consultant surgeons at Barts Health NHS Trust and medical students at QMUL used Google Glass to film a surgical procedure that was watched live via computer or mobile phone, by 13,000 surgical students, healthcare professionals and members of the public from around the world in over 115 countries. That was the UK’s first global live-streamed surgical teaching session.

[Via: qmul.ac.uk]