Education India Project #14455

Helping medical students become better doctors

by QMed Knowledge Foundation

Project Report | Sep 15, 2022
Online courses or Fundraising - the Dilemma

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

Money or Mission? For many not for profit organizations, this is a struggle! We are still struggling to find an answer to the question – Do we focus on our online (E-learning courses) or on fundraising? How do we balance both?

For QMed to be self-sufficient – the answer appears almost crazily simple! Our E-learning courses at www.qmedcourses.in – have had great reviews. We offer a full package to institutions at a very affordable cost. And to individuals for a reasonable donation.

If all medical colleges in the country (approximately 500) pay for access, we do not need to do any fundraising. We may even be able to give access at a lower fee! We’d be happiest if we could work on our mission and not worry about raising funds.

But getting a medical college to subscribe, is a challenge. There are lots of reasons for this – and they are based on a “They don’t know what they don’t know” scenario. Beliefs like

Everyone really knows how to search because they are tech savvy
The existing research methodology courses cover the topics (the reality is they do not)
It is too heavy for medical students in their already overloaded curriculum (we have found that students learn it the fastest)
Nothing new can be included in the curriculum without approvals. The reality is there IS a line in the current curriculum – every Indian medical graduate MUST know how to search online!

And so – as we work on these challenges, we still have bills to pay and salaries to fork out.

As you read this, how can you help?

Ask us if you need to know more details about our work and our needs
Continue to donate - we still need help
Spread the word about us – it still makes a big difference!
If you have done our courses – please talk about them. As often as you can. Convince others to do them
If you are from an institution that has subscribed – spread the word – and ensure that lots of students and faculty go through the learning. So that the institution renews and the next incoming batch of students gets the opportunity to learn
If you can introduce us to institution heads – please do
And finally if you can create magic with the National Medical Commission – do help us out!

Links:

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Aug 29, 2022
New badges for our E-Learning Courses - for specific skills

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

Aug 18, 2022
A live workshop after more than 2.5 years

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

Program banner - KGMU

One of the activities we missed a lot during the pandemic was conducting live workshops. These workshops are most often filled with energy and enthusiasm – both for participants and for us. The last one I did was in January 2020, at a conference of the Academy of Family Physicians of India

And now in August 2022, I had the opportunity of doing one at the King George’s Medical University in Lucknow. It started with a call from them asking for a workshop to celebrate the National Library Day. This is usually observed on Aug 12, to commemorate the birth anniversary of Dr SR Ranganathan, the Father of the Library Science in India. That day being a holiday in Lucknow, it was observed on Saturday, 13^th August, 2022

I conducted a workshop with three sessions - Searching PubMed, Searching the Cochrane Library and a short session on Reference Management with Mendeley. The audience of 81 participants, were mostly Postgraduate Residents, a few faculty members and a couple of Undergraduate students. They were very enthusiastic, interacted a lot, and asked a lot of questions.

The fun parts included young residents wanting pictures with me and a medical student coming up to me and saying "I have already finished one of your E-Learning courses"! These were interactions one missed with only webinars / online modes of teaching. Also as part of the National Library Day observance, the Vice Chancellor, The Dean of Academics and the Dean of Research invited me to join them, to unveil a picture of Dr Ranganathan, to be installed in the Library later. These are small but cherished traditions and I loved being part of them.

The Vice Chancellor had a couple of minutes with me, and he said he wished he could attend the whole workshop as he had not learnt these techniques. I told him that he could do the E-Learning version and he promised he would. This, for me, was the highlight of the event!

What was different about this workshop? QMed now offers institutions a workshop with its E-Learning courses [www.qmedcourses.in]. So any institution that enrolls for the E-Learning automatically gets one workshop too. In cases like the KGMU, they had the workshop first and then we activated the courses website for them. Having the workshop all of them interested in going through the ELearning videos too! We are hoping to see a lot of activity from KGMU on our site - and with that - lots of learning.

We feel that doing a workshop first can make a huge difference. Organizations that take up our online courses, seem to have trouble ensuring that many utilize the learning option. In the coming year we hope more of them start with a workshop before starting the E-Learning modules so that people are motivated to learn a lot from our E-Learning site.

Note:

In the month of SEPTEMBER (12th - 16th) GlobalGiving has a "Little by Little Matching Campaign" where donations upto $50 will be matched with a 50% add on by GlobalGiving. It would be lovely if you could make a donation during that week - so that your contribution to us reaches us with a higher value!

Unveiling the photograph of Dr SR Ranganathan

Links:

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