Case Study: Streaming Medical Education to the Mideast

With streaming video, people are accomplishing things they could never accomplish before. Take, for example, Cornell University's project to transport American-style medical education to the other side of the world —to Qatar, the tiny country on the west coast of the Arabian Gulf. Three years ago, thanks (at least partially) to streaming video technology, Cornell's medical school, the Weill Cornell Medical College was able to open a branch in faraway Qatar. It is the first time that an American university has offered its MD degree overseas.

Although the Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar (WCMC-Q) branch has its own onsite faculty and facilities, an important part of the curriculum is delivered from the U.S. through video-streamed elearning. With this project Cornell is exporting expert medical training, without the hassle and expense of air travel. Many classes in the Qatar medical program are taught by U.S. professors who never leave the comfort of their classrooms in Manhattan and Ithaca, NY. When they travel to Qatar, they travel through cyberspace.

Thanks to the fact that Qatar sits upon a virtual ocean of natural gas, the country is flush with cash, and it has funneled much of this cash into its education infrastructure. The Cornell branch is housed in Education City, an ultra-modern multi-institutional 2500-acre campus near in Qatar's capital city of Doha.

Qatara’s government has provided the Cornell medical school with a dedicated high-speed fiber optic connection (STM-1) between Education City and the U.S. The Qatar branch can use this to connect to either the Cornell University main campus in Ithaca, where the pre-med curriculum originates, or to the Weill Cornell Medical College facility, which is on Manhattan Island. This puts the Cornell faculty and staff in the enviable position of not having to ever worry about the inherent problems associated with the public Internet.

At each end of this optical bridge, Cornell has state-of-the-art lecture hall facilities that are jam-packed with the latest AV and computer technology. Each lecture hall has a projection system, an Apple G5 computer, and an AMX controller built into the lectern, which provides access to an integrated system of electronic teaching tools. This system allows presenters to use a variety of equipment simultaneously. Included in this setup is a document camera for projection of high-quality, 3D color images, as well as CD, DVD, and VCR playback equipment. Internet access is also available from the lectern, which means that material from a Website also can be displayed during a lecture. During streamed distance learning sessions, these lecture halls serve as virtual broadcast centers.