Conference Participants Voting

A lively two-day conference was the highlight of a recent visit by a team of UCSF School of Medicine education leaders to Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences (MUCHS) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The delegation included Associate Dean of Curricular Affairs Helen Loeser, Pharmacology Professor Susan Masters, Associate Director for Educational Research Patricia O'Sullivan, and Educational Technology Director Kevin Souza.

The visit was part of an emerging collaboration between the two institutions, spearheaded by UCSF Global Health Sciences (GHS). Its focus is on building capacity to improve education of health professionals in Tanzania. This initiative was launched last September, when a group of key MUCHS faculty traveled to San Francisco. Out of their discussions with their counterparts at UCSF, priorities and goals for the UCSF return visit to MUCHS emerged and were mutually agreed on.

The primary need was faculty development and technological assistance to mitigate the main challenges currently facing MUCHS. To jump-start and coordinate the project, Dr. Stephanie Taché, assistant professor of family and community medicine, moved to Dar-es-Salaam shortly thereafter (see Project Overview for more details of Dr. Taché's work.)

One of the challenges for MUCHS is the sheer size of the student body: there are 315 health professional students in the first-year class alone, with only one biochemistry professor. To help fill this specific and urgent need, two biochemistry post docs, Selma Omer and Gilles Hickson, were trained and received support to travel to MUCHS in January to teach a basic biochemistry course. Since their final days overlapped with the visit by the UCSF team, they were able to share their experience with the delegation and make critical contributions to the faculty development conference based on their insights.

Selma Omer, Ph.D., at the Conference

For students at MUCHS, the shortage of textbooks and limited access to resources in general is a problem. The School of Medicine team has proposed a number of ways to enable more students to get the information they need. Because of intermittent power shortages and difficulties in accessing the Internet on a reliable basis, the team proposed a number of on-line teaching modules that would reside on local computers and not require Web access.

"I was very impressed with their computer resources", said Kevin Souza. "They have good hardware and a pretty good IT infrastructure. It is a very viable option for them to develop web-based learning materials for the computers in their labs."

Kevin Souza Demonstrating Software

The UCSF delegation brought with them an OMR scanner and trained faculty to run it. This effort was welcomed with particular enthusiasm, as it represented the potential of creating multiple choice exams that could then automatically be evaluated. This would relieve the faculty of the enormous burden of grading hundreds of papers manually. The training in scanner technology was linked to specific sessions in the conference on improving quality of multiple choice questions in order to get good assessment data.

The keynote session of the conference focused on how to enable more interactive learning in large group settings, where students had up until now been taught primarily in traditional lecture-format. (See Conference Schedule for more information.)

The two-day conference was attended by nearly half of the faculty from MUCHS, including all of the key course directors, all of the department chairs, and many of the young, newly recruited faculty. Participants seemed eager to embrace new ideas in education and adopt more interactive, problem-solving learning techniques. Feedback gathered from the conference reviews was overwhelmingly positive.

The team credited their success in part to the dedicated presence and support of MUCHS Dean Dr. Charles Mkony. Dr. Mkony's meeting in 2004 with GHS Director Dr. Haile Debas had been the spark that ignited this partnership. Dr. Mkony's continued strong engagement, the team felt, will ensure the success of this collaboration and its development as a model for similar partnerships.

The team with Dean Charles Mkony (middle) and MUCHS Faculty.


Photos by Mwanzo Millinga

Links:
Project Overview
Interview with Helen Loeser
Global Health Sciences Forges New Partnerships