| Videoconferencing increases the number of students who can be educated |
Wide reach: Videoconferencing technology is available and can be cost-shared among multiple institutions.
A week ago, many of us at the L V Prasad Eye Institute took part in an exciting event — a live lecture by the world-renowned glaucoma expert from Johns Hopkins University, Professor Harry Quigley. A clinician-scientist with over three decades of experience, he is also an outstanding speaker.
This was a special event since it was live and interactive. He was at Baltimore in the U.S., talking to us at 8 AM his time and we were all listening to him here in India at our local time of 1830 hours. Plus, it was not just 170 of us at Hyderabad, but also colleagues at our GMRV campus at Vizag and the BEI campus at Bhubaneswar.
Altogether, Quigley lectured to over 250 people across the globe, spread in three cities quite apart from each other. He was occasionally interrupted by the audience for clarifications and questions. And at the end of the fifty-minute lecture, we had a twenty-minute question-answer session.
It was a specialized topic, namely, clinical aspects of the eye disease glaucoma in which he is an acknowledged authority.
Four major points
He distilled his talk around four major points.
One: chase the family. Glaucoma runs in families. Thus if an elderly member is brought to the clinic, check the accompanying family member too — even if he/she has no complaints. Precautionary steps could be started so as to prevent or take early steps. Glaucoma, the second major cause of blindness, is a ‘silent’, progressive killer of eyesight.
Second: Just do not assume that the eye pressure has to rise to 21 units. This is a myth. Intra-ocular pressure is a person-specific number, depending on several factors. It is thus important to check more details — the size of the ‘disc’, the ‘cup to disc’ ratio, corneal thickness so forth.
Third: Make sure that the patient complies with your advice and uses the drug regularly. Given that the glaucoma patient has to use drops and/or pills regularly, daily, chances of his/her getting ‘fatigued’ over this regimen are high. The doctor has to be after the patient to ensure compliance.
Fourth: Do not depend overly on the new, fancy equipment and technologies. They focus on one or two particular features or parameters. Depend more on your ‘gut feeling’. The latter comes out of the experience of having treated many patients, each an individual in his/her own right.
Cost involved
When I checked the cost involved in putting up this video-conferencing facility, with access to the four sites mentioned above, I was given the number of about two crore rupees at today’s price. Each one of us remembers a teacher or two from our school and college days, who were so good that they even changed the career we chose later.
It was my chemistry teacher at Pilani, Mr Raja Rao, who made the subject come so alive and exciting that I chose chemistry as my career.
How exciting it would be to recall many of these great teachers, request them to teach through this video-access mode on a live, interactive basis, to a large number of students!
The Quigley example
It is not just these. As the Quigley example shows, the best teachers from anywhere can be requested to teach in this mode. And if there is one thing that a good teacher loves, it is to teach and teach more — and just for the asking.
A good teacher gets as much “high” when he teaches, just as some of his more receptive students do. And they love to teach under graduates and high school students.
Long years of teaching and research make them better and better with time. Nobel Prize winners Linus Pauling of Chemistry, Richard Feynman of Physics and Salvador Luria of Biology, always wanted to teach undergraduates and did so until they reached heaven at ripe ages.
Our own Professor C.N.R. Rao loves to teach college and high school students, and they love it too.
India is set to open 8 more IITs and 16 more national universities. These are in addition to the expansion of existing ones, and about an equal number in the private sector. One major problem they face is the lack of teachers, and a dearth of good and inspiring ones at that.
The solution
What is the solution? Use technology: identify outstanding, experienced teachers who have retired from service because they turned 58/60/62 or 65, but are available and willing, and request them to teach in the video-conferencing mode.
Cost-shared
The technology is available, can be cost-shared among multiple institutions, each of which will have access to the facility. Each lecture can thus be heard by several hundred or even thousand students, who can interact with the teacher in real time, ask questions, clear doubts and benefit. As my primary school English teacher told us: Where there is a will, there is a way. And to the cell phone company’s question: “how many students can a teacher educate?” The answer is: Technology expands the limit.
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