I have been thinking about blogging for some time but never took the plunge. Well I just plunged.

This blog will be devoted to interesting bits about the limitations of evidence, how to use evidence in the care of patients, an occasional summary of the evidence itself, and about teaching EBM.

I am embarking on an interesting journey to develop an online course on evidence based medicine for UAB medical students. I previously taught a standard lecture course on EBM but when the curriculum changed my course became a “theme” and thus was mostly dropped from the curriculum (despite it being a theme of the curriculum– go figure!). “Surprisingly” the students’ step 1 scores on EBM type material plummeted. Who would have thought that if they didn’t learn the material they wouldn’t score well on a test? I recently received a fairly large grant to develop an online course to guide the students in learning how to be an EBM practitioner.

This has been an amazing experience so far. I have learned a lot about teaching and learning (though I have been a medical educator for over a decade I keep realizing I don’t know as much as I thought about teaching), curriculum design, and the future I think (and hope) of medical education. I hope my course can become a demonstration project for UAB so that more courses will develop online components and get away from the silly idea of lecturing at medical students and making them learn at our (the teachers) pace and not their own.