Abstract
Background: At Manchester Medical School, students enter the clinical environment having received only limited teaching of cardiovascular examination. This is delivered during a 1-h lecture and 1 h of clinical teaching. I thought this was an insufficient amount of teaching and decided to try and rectify this issue. Six months into year 1 of clinical teaching, the students complete a 4-week Personal Excellence Pathway project, which is designed to help students explore areas of interest to them. To rectify the perceived lack of teaching, I created an interactive iBook that demonstrates in a detailed way how to examine a patient’s cardiovascular system.
Methods: The iBook was created using iBooks Author, a free Apple product. It is interactive and easy to use. I built it using free editing software such as iMovie and iPhoto. Full explanations and demonstrations of the examination itself and of the signs elicited were created using video, audio, clinical images, and links to a glossary. This core content was acquired by spending time in clinics, filming a consultant performing the examination, and acquiring images of clinical features on the wards.
Results: Overall, given the breadth and depth of the subject covered, the iBook took less time to create than I had expected. Recording the video contents took far less time than expected. Obtaining the clinical images for the relevant signs took longer than expected.
Conclusions: Many students now use iPads and Apple laptops as an integral part of their work. The creation of such an interactive iBook that is interesting and widely accessible by the students can be very beneficial to the medical student population. In this 4-week project, I showed that it is possible for a student to create an innovative learning tool in a short amount of time that can enrich the education of fellow students at medical school.
Author contributions: The author has accepted responsibility for the entire content of the submitted manuscript and approved submission. There is no conflict of interest involved in the creation of this article. This article is not an advertisement for the iBook nor for other for Apple products; it is a description of how I went about creating the iBook.
Research funding: None declared.
Employment or leadership: None declared.
Honorarium: None declared.
Competing interests: The funding organisation(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.
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©2015 by De Gruyter
