e-News
Faculty Teaching Medal 2021
Faculty Teaching Medal 2021
Dr Michael Co
Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
 |
What is your main teaching philosophy? My teaching philosophy is to enhance students’ learning experience through Interactions and Innovations. 1. Interactions: Students are more engaged and motivated to learn when the teaching is interactive. As such, keeping my classes as interactive as possible is always my top priority. 2. Innovations: We are in the era of Information technology. I have tried to integrate telecommunications, information technology, and artificial intelligence in my teachings. One example is the use of a chatbot mobile app that I have developed with my friend Dr John Yuen from Department of Computer science. The app, which is equipped with artificial intelligence, allowed history clerking from a virtual patient by our medical students.What is the most rewarding part of teaching? The most rewarding part of teaching is to see how students learn and become good doctors. I am so blessed to be part of their early career development. What have been your greatest challenges in teaching and how did you overcome them? As such, I have developed a novel online surgical skills training session – Web-based surgical skills learning (WSSL). It is an interactive online skills training session where students were given surgical instruments and artificial skins to practice at home. I taught them surgical skills through live broadcast with two cameras while students demonstrate what they have learnt to me online in the same session. This new teaching method has been evaluated by a prospective case-control study and results were published in 2020 and 2021 in two peer-reviewed journals. In addition, students were not able to see patients (for Bedside teachings) in hospital during COVID-19 pandemic. I tried to look into possible solutions and then the idea of creating a chatbot mobile app came into my mind. In 2020, a novel history taking chatbot mobile app (Bennie and the Chats) was developed for medical students to clerk clinical history. They were able to gather clinical history from the virtual patient Bennie and report to me in the bedside teaching sessions. The comments from our students were quite positive. COVID-19 has given us a hard time in maintaining the quality of medical education, but when we look back, the lessons learnt from the medical education adaptations during COVID-19 pandemic is valuable, and has already made an impact on reshaping our future medical education.
Figure 1. During COVID-19 pandemic, surgical ultrasound teaching was converted to Online Interactive Teaching Session. Nowadays when physical teaching has resumed, Dr Co has implemented the “Hybrid” method to teach ultrasound. The live broadcast of ultrasound image allows a closer look of ultrasonographic skills through students’ own mobile devices or laptops while allowing real-time physical interaction with the tutor.
Figure 2. Tutor-student interaction to enhance learning experience |
