Squeezing More into a Day: OSU Medical Students Leverage Technology

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Justin Harper, like other third-year medical students, will have attended more than 2,000 hours of classroom lectures upon graduation and dedicated more than two-thirds of his waking hours to medical school. The pressures of becoming a doctor led Harper to develop a tool that is changing how medical students at The Ohio State University study.

Harper and other medical students at The Ohio State University’s College of Medicine are early adopters of using portable media players to condense classroom material and lengthy lectures using a process to remove nonessential elements such as breaks and pauses. The technology enables a 50-minute lecture to be downloaded and condensed to roughly 30 minutes.

The media players, widely used for entertainment, have become essential in the learning process for new doctors, according to Dr. Catherine Lucey, vice dean for education at Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

“We took a step back and asked ourselves, ‘How would medical students use the devices, ideally, throughout medical school?’ ” says Lucey.


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