According to US News & World Report, Harvard Medical School is the nation’s top medical school for research. How, you may ask, do the students at HMS learn to become to best doctors in the country? With YouTube videos, of course. According to The Boston Globe, HMS has decided to revamp its curriculum, and it is favoring didactic YouTube videos over heavy, dull textbooks.
One professor, Dr. Richard Schwartzstein, has created a number of videos, all between five and eight minutes, which he expects his students to watch outside of class. The videos demonstrate concepts like tying surgical knots and identifying specific body parts, and by watching them over and over, students can learn at a quickened pace. As Schwartzstein puts it, students don’t have the patience for textbooks anymore. Rather than reading through dense paragraphs, they would much rather look up relevant information on Google. “My job, in the time that we’re together, student and teacher, is to teach you what you can’t Google,” said Schwartzstein.
Should Schwartzstein wish, he could also assign videos from his HMS colleagues. The school hosts its own YouTube channel, where, among other content, it has shared a series of videos in which its faculty members explain why Science Matters.
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HMS won’t post full lectures on YouTube, in order to encourage students to actually show up at class. However, for those who want a med school education without ever setting foot in a classroom, some other prestigious universities, such as Stanford, have shared entire lectures online.
