A Letter from Eric Johnson...
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings for 2002 from AO North America, the Continuing Education Department, and the rest of our staff. 2001 was an incredible year of tragedy and triumph and one that will remain with us for years to come. Hopefully 2002 offers a different world and one in which we will meet new challenges and new opportunities and succeed with both. Within AONA, the "Digital Course" has emerged and will become a reality this year. While we have slowly assimilated new presentation technology over the past several years and most faculty now use digital presentations, this year seems to be coalescing into one that truly incorporates a digital theme for the core of our course structure.
For the first time, a major AONA course, Sun Valley March 2002, has been organized around a digital course format. Under the direction of course co-chairman Peter Trafton, the talented members of our Continuing Education Team have incorporated a collaboration software platform called "eRoom" as a means of instantaneous virtual communication between faculty and course organizers. The course in its entirety has been structured on this secure web site to provide faculty access to all teaching assignments, course format, lab instructor assignments, and lab videos, which are viewable on home PC and provide a venue for faculty instruction and communication. This is all digitalinternet- based information transfer and is the route AONA will take in the future. No longer will AONA be burdened with mailing large amounts of course information to faculty. This system offers the opportunity to upload individual presentations to the web master site so lectures can be viewed by faculty and preloaded into the course, eliminating the cumbersome delays and occasional failures of individual laptop presentations. This will also help to eliminate redundancy in lectures and allow individual faculty to focus on improving their presentations.
This new system provides an incredible advance in technology which we have long anticipated. Taking advantage of internet-based course structuring and communication with course faculty is the way of the future. The ability to provide faculty nearly everything they need to prepare presentations and send in presentations in advance can only make the AO courses run that much smoother. Our ability to allow secure observation of current video will also help reduce down-time that occurs during a course when a faculty member is not totally familiar with a specific laboratory exercise.
The eRoom web site also provides viewing of bone models, bone equipment videos for the lab exercises, a Chairman’s Discussion Forum, course calendar, course faculty names and e-mail addresses, faculty information folder, and an introduction to the resort. This is a marvelous service and a milestone in AONA education. We are striving to be on the cutting edge of technology in education, and the Sun Valley March 2002 course is the test run for these new tools.
The AONA web site, www.aona.com continues to be a popular site for information exchange. We have divided the web site into several key areas including electronic course registration and a multimedia library where classic surgical technique videos can be observed as a streaming video. This web site also includes a clinical "Case Documentary" for each AONA subspecialty, the AONA Users Manual, the latest issue of AO North America News, the AONA organizational structure, technique guides and links to subspecialty internet pages. I suggest that you encourage your residents to visit this site for information about AO North America and the opportunity to watch surgical videos preoperatively.
We are certainly now in the digital age and soon slides will be as obsolete as the 8-track cassette. For this reason, AONA provided a digital faculty resource center at the Dallas AONA Residents Course in January. AS a result, and due also to the new emphasis on digital communication and presentation media, the AONA Department of Continuing Medical Education has created a new Faculty Resource Center that will be available at every major AONA course. Replacing the outdated concept of the "speaker ready-room," the Faculty Resource Center is equipped with several state-of-the art computers and display screens, high-speed internet connections, slide digitizers, an x-ray digitizer, and multiple laptops. The Center is staffed by a dedicated computer expert who is available on site to provide technical media assistance and computer support.
The Faculty Resource Center was inaugurated at the Los Angeles Residents Course and has since been used at the Steamboat Springs Maxillofacial Advanced Symposium. In both instances, the Resource Center was very popular and was used frequently by the faculty. Many surgeons who had not yet made the facilities and the expertise of the on-site staff to "enter the digital realm". We look forward to using the Resource Center as a tool for AONA faculty. The future of AO North America education is full of such opportunities to improve our courses and keep AONA the gold standard in surgical education. Thank you for your continued support of AO North America and our worldwide AO family.
Sincerely,
Eric E. Johnson, M.D.