Forensic medicine teaches medical students how to deal with deaths. Focus is on logistics, possible contact to the police and description of injuries. This provides the students with an understanding of how injuries occur in living or dead people, while teaching them about special circumstances when in contact with patients who have been subject to violence and assault.
There was a need to support the students’ preparation of the subject’s key concepts, so that in-class teaching might focus on case work. At the same time, an idea was expressed to make particularly difficult material easier to understand and revise by making videos based on existing PowerPoint presentations. Finally, there was a wish to secure the students’ scientific level through the use of videos.
The teacher used a screencast program to produce the videos in which the basic concepts were introduced and explained. The videos used existing PowerPoint presentations as a point of departure; these used a combination of images, movement and speech as supporting modalities to activate student learning.
The students are better prepared and it is possible to start from a common starting point. Each semester, there has been positive feedback from the students, who typically mention that it is nice to be able to prepare in an easy way. However, it is a challenge to get the students to watch the video before teaching when it comes to small class teaching because it is difficult to contact the classes individually. It is also the impression that the students do not always familiarize themselves with Blackboard (NB: Brightspace is now used) before the teaching.
