Grandpa remembers…
This year’s 25th MHPE anniversary brings back great memories. Jan van Dalen, Programme director from the first hour, has been involved in the programme for a long time; he looks back on his experiences in the early days of no e-mail or Blackboard…
Nowadays it is hard to imagine that we mostly used surface mail and couriers for communication between students and staff of the MHPE in those early days of 1992. Comparatively this took ages, but we didn’t know any better. The most advanced medium was Telex, and shortly after that: Fax. Both quickly became popular because they did away with snail-mail time, extending the deadline for submission of assignments!
By 1992 Maastricht University was already fairly well-known for its innovative way of organizing medical education. Following McMaster University at Hamilton, Canada, Maastricht was the second medical school to use problem-based learning throughout its curriculum.
Drawn by an increasing body of evidence with this educational approach, by pioneers like Henk Schmidt, Peter Bouhuys, Els Boshuizen and Cees van der Vleuten, our school already attracted many visitors from all over the world. Frankly, we had become slightly overwhelmed with all this attention, so it was an obvious choice to channel our ‘lessons learned’ and provide a training programme.
The international student population and distance education have always been prominent features of our programme. In the first ten-fifteen years the MHPE-has attracted between 10 and 20 international participants each year. This small scale programme allowed for a strong connection between students and staff, which was appreciated by both parties. Moreover, the distance-education feature allowed our learners -busy health care professionals- to study from home and apply their new knowledge and skills immediately in their own workplace.
A big risk in such a programme would be isolation of the participants. To reduce that risk we chose to start each of the two academic years with a campus-based unit, conducted full-time at Maastricht. Cohesion between the group members and bonds between staff and students developed here. Yet, the campus-based units lasted six weeks and were scheduled in January! We organized various social events, like the famous cultural evening where Gerard Majoor tried to motivate people to eat raw herring.
However, little did we realise that six weeks away from home and family is very long, especially without the current communication media. In the final two weeks people mostly learned about home-sickness… Moreover, Dutch climate is not common to all participants, so I have strong, embarrassing memories of students attending sessions in our tutorial rooms dressed up in coats, scarfs and mittens! Mistakes like these pointed out some of our blind spots…
Throughout the years many more blind spots have become visible, thanks to our students. I am happy that this has helped to foster an attitude of lasting improvement in the programme. Our programme evaluations provide rich suggestions and we try to follow them as much as we can. My thanks go out to all those who have been in the programme and who developed from our students to our colleagues, if not our Masters!
Jan van Dalen