Who, what, when and where?

• Dr. Mark Braun, Medical Sciences, Bloomington.
• Team-Based Learning, authoring and analysis of exercises.
• October, November, January, February, April (or by arrangement)
• Indiana University, Bloomington, and possibly by remote access.

The basic story.

Educators of health sciences face a many challenges today. On the one hand we are asked to improve content mastery and knowledge acquisition, but do it with shrinking resources and expanding time constraints. We are told our medical students must arrive at their clerkships with developed problem solving skills and be what I cal self-starting learners. Intermixed is the need to work and participate effectively in a team environment. How can these objectives be met and still keep from running our students, and ourselves, into the ground?

There probably is no single pedagogical silver bullet, but one approach that meets many medical education requirements is team-based learning. Originally developed for schools of business and management, the principles apply to the teaching, learning and practice of medicine.

In this elective, you will learn about team-based learning and its cousin, problem-based learning. The two are different as will become evident as you move to the planning and authoring phase of the course. We are going to start, however, by doing some basic groundwork with respect to teaching and learning. We'll consider learning styles and preferences, as well as the much venerated, and still very applicable, Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Then we will consider the specific learning modality of team-based learning and the fun and frustrations of authoring these clinical exercises. Special emphasis will be placed on authoring TBL cases that are multi-disciplinary and integrate the clinical and basic sciences.

This website contains the basic material and links to references that we will use in this senior elective. There is much more to team-based learning than I can list here, so I see this as only the beginning.

As we embark on this elective, I put one question to you:

• Is teaching and learning the same thing?