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Education
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Cleveland Clinic aims to foster K-12 recruits through education
Feb 15, 2007
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by James Careless
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Once upon a time, the city of Cleveland was renowned for its heavy industry, manufacturing, and transportation of goods via the Ohio and Erie Canal. But things have changed: Cleveland's traditional industries have gone into serious decline, replaced by service-oriented employers such as health care and health sciences.
Today, the city's largest employer is the world famous Cleveland Clinic. Founded in 1921 by four doctors -- and now employing more than 1,600 physicians -- the Cleveland Clinic is ranked as the third best hospital in the country by U.S. News and World Report and the top-ranked facility for heart treatment.
With medicine being central to Cleveland's 21st century economy, it only makes sense for the Cleveland Clinic to foster the recruitment of new medical staff. "Specifically, we were looking at the number of shortages in hard-to-fill positions such as nursing, radiology, and respiratory therapists," said Rosalind Strickland, senior director of the Cleveland Clinic's Office of Civic Education Initiatives. "Our CEO, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, decided that the most effective charitable activity for the Cleveland clinic would be to address these shortages head-on, by making K-12 education our number one priority."
As a result, the Office of Civic Education Initiatives has established a broadband Web portal called Real World Connect. Offered free of charge to regional K-12 schools, Real World Connect provides teachers and students with a wide range of multimedia learning tools, including streamed video of live and recorded surgeries conducted at the Cleveland Clinic.
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| Real World Connect, a broadband Web portal for K-12 students, provides teachers and students with multimedia content including streamed video of surgeries. |
"We've built a curriculum so that students can actually see the latest advances in medicine and how they are revolutionizing health care," Strickland explained. "A teacher could assign their students to watch one of our surgeries for biology homework, or show one as a teaching tool during class."
Making Connections
The Cleveland Clinic's Real World Connect is linked to the Cleveland Municipal School District's 105 schools via the nonprofit OneCleveland broadband network. Operated jointly by partners such as Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, and the city of Cleveland, OneCleveland operates a fiber network ring operating at 1 Gbps, which covers much of Cleveland and its suburbs. (The content can also be accessed directly over the Web, but the slower speeds offered by commercial providers can cause delays in multimedia downloads.)
Of course, an ultra high-speed broadband connection isn't enough; to ensure that all schools have problem-free access to its distance learning resources, the Cleveland Clinic has turned to StarBak Communications to provide the necessary video serving and storage facilities. StarBak is employing its entire suite of Integrated Network Video (INV) products, which are designed to let business and government users create, encode, and manage live and recorded multimedia content, then serve it out to network-connected PCs and televisions. From the schools' standpoint, the INV suite consists of a number of hardware and software modules deployed as needed to each user location.
Besides connecting to Real World Connect, the Cleveland Municipal School Board is using OneCleveland and StarBak's INV equipment to conduct virtual field trips to other Web-linked locations, support other forms of distance learning, and interact with students in other schools and other parts of the globe in real time.
Real World Connect is actually a collection of different multimedia courses, all provided free of charge by the Cleveland Clinic. A case in point is Worldwide Classroom, a full slate of distance learning courses that cover math, science, health and wellness, the arts, and innovation. Then there's Earl's Virtual Garage, which uses educational games and self-directed activities to give children interactive, hands-on learning about connections between electricity and medicine.
A third example is Real World Connect's Online X-Ray Library. Designed by students at Mayfield Excel TECC (Technical Education Career Consortium) under the guidance of Cleveland Clinic mentors, the Online X-Ray provides access to real X-ray images in both low and high resolution.
Brain Surgery For Beginners
Perhaps the best way to understand the scope of the Cleveland Clinic's distance learning efforts is to look at a specific instance, namely the viewing of three different surgical procedures by students enrolled in the Cleveland School of Science & Medicine at John Hay High School. After being closed for five years in order to be "rebuilt from the walls up," according to principal Edward Weber, John Hay is now equipped with 62 OneCleveland-connected classrooms equipped with PCs, TVs, and VBrick digital video recorders.
"The Cleveland Clinic provides us with complete courses for our students, including printed materials, DVDs, and suggested projects," Weber said. "Whenever they alert us that such a course is coming up, I tell the science department and they decide whether or not to take part."
In the case of a recent trio of operations -- covering deep brain stimulation, spinal surgery, and the repair of a brain embolism -- teacher Kimberley Svec decided to sign up her three science classes. "Each class was assigned to a specific procedure," she explained. "Each class was also broken into three groups.
"The first group served as medical researchers responsible for finding out about the procedure using the Web. The second group was made up of medical artists, who had to create illustrations and explanations of the procedure to be done. The third were made up of presenters, who had to brief the rest of the class on how the procedure was to be executed."
Because the students did all of this work before the operations took place, they were well briefed by the time scalpels sliced flesh on TV. "They had already seen a lot of photos and graphics, so they knew what to expect from the operations and what to watch for," Svec added. "They didn't have problems with the graphic images. Instead, some were disappointed that they didn't get to see the procedures from the beginning, such as watching the skull being 'cracked' for the embolism operation."
There's no doubt that these multimedia courses are a welcome departure from typical lectures, but do they deliver the results that the Cleveland Clinic is hoping for, namely motivating more students to think about entering medicine? Because the program only began in May 2006, it's too early to start scanning enrollment at post-secondary institutions. However, Svec said her students are definitely learning more thanks to these courses.
"They attend John Hay because they are interested in science and medicine, but there's no doubt that getting such direct exposure to real operations boosts their educational experience," Svec offered. "It makes surgery real, helping them to understand what the actual procedures are like, as compared to the sped-up versions seen on primetime TV."
MORE INFO
Cleveland Clinic clevelandclinic.org
Cleveland Municipal School District cmsdnet.net
OneCleveland Network onecleveland.org
Starbak Communications starbak.com
VBrick vbrick.com
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