Northern medical schools

Last week, the Director of Technology Pasi Pinta, and I took a trip out west to see things are going at the UBC Northern Medical Program. Based in Prince George, this new program is similar in concept to NOSM - community based, rural oriented, focused on the needs of the north. They started a year before us and are similar in many ways.

Their teaching is also highly oriented towards the online paradigm - the only way for them to provide teaching material from the mother ship in Vancouver. They have a very impressive videoconference setup - this was one of the main reasons for our trip. Our ongoing struggles to achieve smooth networking and in particular videoconferencing contrast greatly with the success that they have had. So it was time to go find out what they are doing right and learn from it.

There were a number of factors but mostly it boils down to having a stable Layer 2 LAN (sorry for the geek speak but that basically means a proper fully contigous network domain architecture) with sufficient bandwidth...and more importantly, the bandwidth for videoconferencing was protected. A part of the "pipe" was specifically reserved for videoconferencing and nothing else.

Currently in our setup, all our network traffic including videoconference services, goes on the same network. A lot of work has been done over the past year to eliminate bottlenecks in the system. But network traffic has grown hugely for both campuses (ok, you purists and pedants...campi) over the past 6 months. So even with things optimized, we are still running into problems with network congestion. Happily, we are working on a big new upgrade to our network infrastructure that should alleviate most of this.

There were several other factors which were noticeable. There is a greater emphasis on large group sessions, and they don't do as many videoconferenced or audioconferenced small group sessions as we do. This focus on the quality of their large group sessions has resulted in a near seamless experience for their lectures. They also have a very nice 3 screen setup (see below) which does make it easier to follow content, than the 2 screen setup that we have.



They have also put in a much higher bandwidth connection between their campi - this too is something that Pasi will actively pursue. But it was a wonderful example of how teaching and learning can be made so much smoother and more effective.