At my company The Online Scientist, we work with researchers. Scientists are very internationally oriented people who travel a lot and who need to keep up with the knowledge in their field. This can be troublesome, because there is obviously a trade-off between how much time they can spend learning and visiting colleagues to learn, and how much time they can spend applying that knowledge. If there is one group of people I know that suffers from the spatial and temporal boundaries to learning, it’s them!

So for the best, and more importantly the most frequent, ubiquitous learning experience they need to have low thresholds. They need to invest as little time as possible, and spatial requirements should be absent. Thus, online learning ensures that they can do update themselves using the most recent knowledge without having to invest precious time traveling or attending classes that are not geared toward their own pace.

To discuss an example of how we tackle this, I want to show you some of our work. We have made a few courses for the European School of Urology (ESU). Urologists should spend most of their time in the hospital, treating patients for diseases like bladder cancer and prostate cancer. It’s a waste of their precious skills to have them invest too much time in visiting colleagues or lectures. So to make sure that they possess the latest knowledge on how to treat these conditions, we made a course for the ESU’s virtual school that lets the urologists study the most recent guidelines at their own pace, in their own environment.

With the accelerating speed at which scientific knowledge progresses, e-learning courses like these are key in ensuring that medical professionals use the most recent knowledge when they treat patients, without limiting them in their spatial and temporal dimensions. This truly is life-long learning.

I can’t show you the course itself, but in this show reel we have inserted some of the slides for these courses: https://www.theonlinescientist.com/elearning-portfolio/

Here’s the European School of Urology: https://uroweb.org/education/about-esu/esu-teaching-activities/