Ian Drummond
Case Western Reserve University - Weatherhead School of Management
Chris Laszlo
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Imagine a time when you were overwhelmed by the thought of a lengthy and arduous learning process that stood between you and your desired future.
Do you know who feels this type of overwhelm all of the time? Medical students.
By creating an online learning platform for medical education that makes learning clinical medicine efficient and, importantly, durable, OnlineMedEd.org (OME) converts an overwhelming learning task into a pleasant challenge. OnlineMedEd accomplishes this by applying all that science has revealed about how adults learn in combination with the power of the internet and related technologies. In fact, at this point in human history when acquiring new knowledge and learning new skills will likely be a necessity for many people at multiple points in their careers as the pace of technological innovation disrupts the economy on a more and more frequent basis, OME envisions a world in which their learning paradigm will be available to help anyone learn anything, and fast.
Video of this interview can be found here: https://youtu.be/C9_0cqkqvgE
The key innovation of OnlineMedEd (OME) is the deliberate application of adult learning psychology research to the teaching of clinical medicine via a multi-modality online learning platform. The company's CEO, Jamie Fitch, describes this platform as "part education, part education methodology, and part technology." Jamie readily admits that OME is not the first to venture into the world of online education and acknowledges that there are many players in this market. However, in integrating excellent educational content with evidence-based teaching methodology all bolstered by internet technologies, OME has been able to offer a streamlined learning experience that few others have been able to create.
OnlineMedEd's educational system can be summarized by the acronym PACE, which stands for Prime, Acquire, Challenge, and Enforce, each of these words corresponding to a stage in the learning process consisting of deliberately chosen activities at deliberately prescribed points in time. The Prime stage comes first and consists of reading and note taking on an outline of the material to be covered in the Acquire stage. Soon after priming, during the Acquire stage, students watch and listen to a short video of Dr. Dustyn Williams (co-founder and lead educator) explaining the material while drawing stylized pictures and graphs in real-time. Soon after watching the video, students transition to the Challenge stage, which consists of taking a multiple choice exam which forces them to recall the information they were suppose to acquire. Lastly, students move to the Enforce stage, which occurs exactly 48 hours after the Acquire stage when OME's automated flashcard system activates to prompt students to recall, once again, the information they were suppose to have acquired.
Importantly, each stage employs a primary learning modality (e.g., reading, writing, watching, listening, forced recall) at a evidence-based point in time (e.g., immediately, 48 hours later) thus applying findings of research on adult psychology for efficient learning with maximum retention. Furthermore, through out all stages of their learning system, OME applies a philosophy of 'less is more.' As Jamie puts it, “we teach you what you need to know, at the level you need to know it. It sounds like a simple concept, but it has not been applied across the board in education, and that in and of itself has separated [our] platform”.
Taken together, this is the streamlined learning experience that OME has worked tirelessly to offer its users: part education of Dr. Williams and other content experts; part PACE methodology; and part web technology of the OnlineMedEd website. There is also likely a 4th part that Jamie failed to mention: the business acumen and leadership of their CEO, who quietly orchestrates the whole thing.
Medical students are perennially overwhelmed by the torrents of medical knowledge they are supposed to acquire. Worse, they are often left to suffer a decades-old, disjointed medical curriculum provided by their medical school consisting of hundreds of individual professors delivering hundreds of uncoordinated lectures. OnlineMedEd is the solution, and medical students love them for it.
Jamie describes part of OnlineMeded's origin story as fairly common in that he and co-founder Dr. Dustyn Williams “went through [medical] school, had a bad experience, and said, man, we can do it better.” It is "pretty classic for a startup to have a bad experience and then go off and a contribute in a way to improve the scenario." However, what sustained the founders from 2013 (when they established the company) to November of 2014 when they finally launched the fully functional online learning platform that OnlineMedEd.org is today was the overwhelmingly positive response of medical students to their free video archive, which the two had been creating and curating before they surrounded it with their premium learning platform. It proved that the need was real, which inspired the founders to persevere through the growing pains of startup life.
With the help of the internet, OnlineMedEd is scalable to anyone with an internet connection, thus providing world-class clinical medical education to everyone for free (and to their premium service for a subscription fee). This contributes to the fulfillment of SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). Importantly, OME also makes learning easier and faster, which is an especially salient point for medical students, who are expected to acquire a massive knowledge base in just a few short years. This expectation is exceedingly stressful for medical students and can lead to burnout. Thus, OME's streamlined learning platform may also be seen as fulfilling SDG #3 (Good Health and Well-Being) as learning becomes more effortless as the demands of knowledge acquisition are converted from an overwhelming task to a pleasant challenge. One might describe this a flourishing! (In fact, Dr. Williams actually speaks about medical students leveraging online learning to increase their mental well-being: https://thedoctorweighsin.com/leveraging-e-learning-med-students-mental-health/).
After nearly two years of researching and refining the educational methodologies that were to eventually become the PACE paradigm and then creating the technological system that was to support their new online platform, OnlineMedEd's premium subscription service was finally ready to be rolled out in November of 2014. Within 24 hours of launching, OnlineMedEd had enrolled 2500 users and was generating a 5-figure revenue. By 6 weeks, the company was profitable.
While financials and other figures were not discussed in detail during the interview for this article, as of late 2017, OME had well over 100,000 monthly users about 10% of which were premium subscribers. It is thus reasonable to say that OME is doing well by doing good!
The societal benefit of OnlineMedEd hopes to extend well beyond the education of the next generation of physicians (and other student health professionals who also use the site), although that is certainly its greatest contribution to date. To that end, OnlineMedEd is currently piloting its educational framework in other subject areas such as nutrition, law, and leadership.
But this foray into non-medical fields feels like just the beginning for OME. As Jamie commented,"we've realized that the tools we’ve built can be applied to truly any scenario that has adult learning." He also feels that we, as a country and global society, are going to need to do just that, citing the rise of autonomous driving vehicles as just one many looming economic disruptors that will force many adults out of a job and into new learning situations if they are to earn a living: "The world is moving toward automation. So, we are going to lose a lot of jobs that we rely on today. Trucking comes to mind. We are very close to autonomous cars. 3 million drivers, or 1% of the population, will lose their jobs and will need to transition to new jobs. How are we going to do that as a society?"
The solution will undoubtedly be multi-factorial, but OME hopes to be a big part of it. "We have a lot of data, and we work with universities to put out studies that can be replicated and proven. We want people learning from what we are doing...not just from the content, or the technology, or the education, but all of the components together. We’re hoping that will have an impact on the future."
So, if you ever find yourself in need of learning something -- and fast -- be sure to keep OME in mind for your future learning solutions.
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