Teaching Without Borders at St. George’s University, West Indies

Problem:

A Peace Through Medicine scholarship program at St. George’s University in Grenada, West Indies targets students in South Sudan in environments that are not conducive to learning. Their textbooks are dated, they lack internet access and their schools don’t have experienced faculty.

The program allows select students from South Sudan to study medicine at St. George’s University. The goal is that upon graduation they will help build the medical infrastructure in their home country.

Solution:

Using Mediasite, St. George’s University records lectures on its campus and makes them available to those students.

“The Mediasite Vodcast Module allowed us to present both video and slides to students outside of our Mediasite infrastructure in a simple MP4 format that was downloaded onto tablets for offline on-demand viewing,” said Dari Twum-Barimah, rich media engineer, St. George’s University School of Medicine.

He and his colleagues converted hundreds of presentations, making it seamless to reach a wider audience outside of the campus, bridging the gap left by a lack of internet connectivity.

“With Mediasite, we have given our students an opportunity to have a professor on-demand. The students who took part in this initiative … were able to view updated content in physiology, immunology and molecular biology, all via Mediasite,” he said.

Results:

Students in South Sudan were given the necessary tools to review the Mediasite videos, such as tablets, projectors and SD cards with e-learning material. An intranet was set up allowing students to connect to a virtual library so they can stay current in a changing world of medicine.

“Before Mediasite, we would’ve had to rely solely on PowerPoint presentations and PDF files,” Dari said. “Now we no longer have to compromise on our distribution of rich video content to students around the world and in remove locations. The video capture and management framework that Mediasite provides gives St. George’s University a huge range of possibilities when it comes to teaching without borders. Mediasite allows SGU to meet its motto — think beyond.”