Webcasting: lectures over the internet

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2006. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

There are numerous different ways of learning, including lectures, reading and small group work, and everyone has a preferred learning style. I hate lectures: most are boring or even just bad. The odd good one gets drowned out, and often you only walk away with a couple of points, missing a lot of useful information. Of course these days everyone uses PowerPoint, and the slides are usually available, though after the talk I find some of them don’t mean as much without the speaker explaining them.

I am always looking to IT to provide me solutions, and I have done several online tutorials with doctors.net and onmedica.net. These can be good and are often clinical, and usually take the form of a case presentation with questions that you have to answer by reading the information. I also get summaries of all the major published journal articles emailed to me weekly, which saves me reading the journals.

When I was told that GP magazine was going to be introducing a new online learning tool, and asked if I could do an article on webcasting prior to its launch, I jumped at the chance, as I am always trying to find new ways to pick up information quickly.

You have always been able to watch videos on the internet, and there are several different ways in which this can be done. You can download a video file to watch at your leisure, or have a video streamed to your browser. Streaming means you don’t download the whole video first - only the bit you are watching is sent to you. The BBC has been doing this with audio from its radio channels for some time. The recent comedy programme on Channel 4 called The IT Crowd was available to watch online before it was shown on air.

Streaming education via webcasting is relatively new and can be used in a variety of ways. At its simplest, a standard lecture that you might attend at a medical school or educational event, with PowerPoint slides, can be videoed and distributed on the internet. It can either be watched live, if you know when it is on, or it can be watched at your convenience via any internet-connected computer.

When I was researching webcasting I reviewed a couple of sites already running this kind of system. These contained webcasts of conferences and lectures on a variety of topics with multiple speakers. The websites are well designed, giving a lot of information on who is speaking on what and which topics are covered. They let you choose which lectures or talks you want to watch in whatever order you want to watch them. While you are watching, the video can be fast-forwarded or rewound, and you can watch as many times as you like. It was easy to register: I simply gave my name and email and I was allowed access. Of course some providers could charge or restrict access, and some talks may only be available for a limited time. The sites I watched allowed access either by broadband or by dial-up, though the picture quality is better on broadband. They also worked from the surgery and at home, and didn’t interfere with Choose and Book.

All of this is done in your internet browser. What you will see, after logging on and choosing what you want to watch, is the lecturer in one window and their slides, which the live audience can see, in another window. The slides change as the speaker changes them. Some systems have a third window where questions can be emailed to the speaker, though this will only work if the lecture is live or if someone is prepared to answer questions at a later date.

The sites I have looked at have all been real lectures that a film crew has recorded and published, though there is no reason why this needs to be the case. Custom talks on a variety of subjects can be offered. I can see medical schools taking to this, and I could finally get to see all those lectures I missed because I was still in bed.

GP is launching its service in April and I believe plans to have a variety of presentations available around such topics as QOF targets and commissioning. I would like to see it develop and offer a whole range of topics, from basic things like how to examine and assess a joint to rare diseases or conditions. I would like to see GPs doing the talks for GPs, and would like something similar to the all-day refresher conferences that are available, but with the ability to watch only the bits I want and watch them as many times as I would like.

I feel this has great potential and could be a valuable tool in my ongoing learning plan. Hopefully it will record what I have watched, to produce documentation for my appraisal.