Posted on 08/31/2011 10:53:20 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Yale School of Medicine students’ backpacks just got a whole lot lighter.
In an effort to save paper and make course materials more accessible, the Yale School of Medicine is providing all its students with an iPad 2 — Apple’s latest version of its tablet computer — for use in the classroom and clinical settings, medical school administrators announced in a press release Tuesday. Students will be able to download the entire medical curriculum on the device, as well as use it to read and handle confidential patient health information, said Michael Schwartz, assistant dean for curriculum at the medical school. The device will be theirs to keep even after graduation.
“It’s portable, it’s wireless, it’s responsive, it’s interactive and it will provide tremendous opportunities for our students to engage with the material,” said Richard Belitsky, deputy dean of education at the medical school.
The school is distributing about 520 iPads in total, Schwartz said. First-year students and third- through fifth-year students have already received theirs, and the rest will be given out by early next week.
Administrators first considered giving students iPads in order to reduce paper use, Schwartz said. The school spends about $100,000 each year to copy, collate and distribute course materials, he said, which students themselves find inconvenient.
Yale’s initial expenditure this year on the new iPads was about $600,000, but in future years money saved on printing expenses will cover the cost of the devices, Schwartz said.
The School of Medicine tested the use of iPads in the classroom with a pilot group of nine first-year students last spring. The group included some students who self-identified as not “technology-savvy,” but even they responded positively to the device, Schwartz said. For those who remain committed to pen and paper, printed course materials will be available for purchase.
Robert Stretch MED ’14, a student in the pilot group, said he much preferred reading course notes electronically to having them on paper.
“We get binder upon binder of notes, literally several feet of notes, and carrying them to the library or to class is just unrealistic,” Stretch said.
The pilot program allowed students to give feedback to administrators about which applications on the iPad were most useful to them, Schwartz said. As a result the school purchased iPads equipped with the application GoodReader, which students said was the best for annotating PDF files. The University also decided to give each student an Apple Bluetooth keyboard for use with the device, or the option to buy a keyboard online, since students found external keyboards essential for note-taking.
Administrators purchased 64-GB iPads that support 3G Internet access through AT&T. Students can choose to activate a 3G data plan at their own expense if they find the need to do so, though they will be able to access the Internet through Wi-Fi while on campus.
Besides being portable and allowing students to quickly download updates to lecture notes, iPads offer opportunities for interactive teaching, Belitsky said.
Robert Camp MED ’97, an associate research scientist in the Pathology Department, has adopted the iPad for use in small class discussions. Camp developed a program last year to send images to his students’ devices and ask them to identify a medical problem by circling it on the screen. He can have students’ annotated images sent back to him and use them to facilitate discussion, he said.
The iPad is also a more secure device than a laptop for handling Electronic Protected Health Information, Schwartz said. Students work with this confidential information when they do clinical training, and in the past campus staff needed to set up special security on students’ laptops for them to be able to handle it safely. By contrast, the iPad is encrypted and can be remotely locked or erased completely if it is lost or stolen.
“[The iPad] will be a good approach for students to access the health information of our patients,” School of Medicine Dean Robert Alpern said.
Yale is not the first school to introduce iPads for classroom use — the Stanford University School of Medicine gave the devices to incoming first-year and master’s students in fall 2010 — but it is making the leap before many of its peer institutions.
“We’re trying to be innovative in ways that enhance the learning of our students,” Belitsky said. “We don’t just want to be innovative; we want to make use of new technologies if they provide our students opportunities to learn more effectively.”
He added that iPads are expected to become increasingly used by doctors in hospitals and other clinical settings, which he said is yet another reason to familiarize medical students with them.
The iPad was first released in April 2010, and the iPad 2 came out in March 2011.
Actually HIPAA —> ARRA/HITECH *does* provide incentives and requirments to move to electronic health records and demonstrate their meaningful use. So ... in a way our tax dollars ARE helping Yale Medical School and most ALL hospitals buy stuff.
It’s a big part of the ARRA.
In the end it is a good thing that healthcare providers are moving to EHRs. iPADS are a good tool, even if they are a platform tailor made for spreading nosocomial infections ;-)
Yeah you can do more than one thing with an IPAD. If you stop doing what you’re doing and do something else.
At least this way apple makes big bucks scamming the schools and can turn off the plug anytime they want to. Great deal.
I’ll stick to textbooks that don’t tell me what I have to use to access them.
If you are saying that Yale does not receive federal government money that is provided by taxpayers via the US Treasury/Printing press you might want to re-think that....
Yale and other universities have lots of Federal money poured in to them via grants. Student tuition is a factor but
Because of the federal subsidizes like this one that granted $93 million in federal "stimulus" money Yale has the ability to do this iPad program.
I looked at the Yale numbers a few years back for someone in our family. If I recall correctly their budget is about $2.5 billion a year. They have somewhere around 11,000 students. If you use a high number of $50,000 for a full time student there is no way tuition can run the place. I think they recently had a budget shortfall and were cutting back expenditures.
Private school? Kinda:)
Sorry about the 4th sentence above. I was posting with one of my iPads and made a boo-boo. I was saying there that “student tuition is a factor but it is only a part of Yale’s income stream”.
I don't know about that. We've found they're pretty easy to clean in our dental office. Lots easier than a keyboard!
I have experience at Yale. Yale takes in very little government funds - less than a percent. They get most of their money from private grants and research budgets. Only a small percentage (say.. 15%) of their revenue comes from tuition.
Yale has been trying to get tech in the hands of every student since the Viewsonic tablets in the late 90s. It appears this time it got approval.
Yale’s habits for getting technology are rock solid. Of all my complaints of Yale, this isn’t one of them.
WOW! Another one who doesn't know what he's talking about expounding his ignorance!
I'll grant you that money is fungible... But that does not mean that these iPads were paid for with Federal dollars. These students would be buying text books. Now they will be putting lower cost digital books on their iPads. You are making unwarranted assumptions. You take a deduction for your mortgage. Does the Federal government pay for your car? Money is after all fungible, isn't it?
But some people don't like textbooks: Introducing the Book (YouTube)
I spent 300 bucks and I got myself a laptop. More features, way more memory. Why not buy kids actual frickin’ laptops rather then hand out Ipads?
One word: convenience. But I suppose they could just hand out scrolls on sheep skin instead.
Excellent choices! I use GoodReader a lot - to download PDFs and webpages. It's a great app for reading. The built-in keyboard is okay, but for lots of notes in a stationary location, I use an external keypad on my iPad. And 3G is valuable, even when you find a free wi-fi spot you often have to share bandwidth with others and sometimes the 3G is faster than the shared wi-fi bandwidth. The iPad automatically switches between them.
Convenience? :lol:
Politics, pure and simple. Politics.
Convenience. As I sit in a Starbucks typing this, I note that most of the patrons have bulky laptops. They're tripping over power cords, when they can find an outlet because they're power-hungry devices. My iPad is easily propped on my knee or hand. Easy to flip the cover when on the move, get settled and flip the cover open to resume where I left off, with no power drain (lasts a dozen hours). And I don't kill my shoulder lugging it around.
When it got lost/stolen a couple months ago (taken while I was in a store waiting on my wife), I was able to later remote locate it and remotely wipe my data while telling the police where it was. I got it back. Less features than a laptop? No, just a different set of features, that are applicable to these students' needs.
Do they have ‘wings’?
Thanks! Figures that a med school would be an early adopter of a tablet, eh?
Well put. I think Snow White couldn’t count, btw.
Yale has a permanent endowment of over $16 billion. They're not living from paycheck to paycheck.
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