Physiology education today: what comes next?

As we planned the articles in this special section, I began thinking about how physiology education has changed in recent years. In many ways, the teaching of physiology has been reflected in its textbooks. Until the early 1980s, those books were mostly descriptive text, with only a few simple line drawings. Contrast that with the physiology textbooks of today, especially at the undergraduate level, with their opulent four-color figures that occupy as much space as the text. Books today come with computer software, CD-ROMs, video tapes, and web sites. What do these changes say about the way physiology is taught and about the way our students learn? My colleagues and I sometimes joke about the challenges of teaching the MTV generation, but this is the reality. Students today are the children who, instead of reading a book or watching a little TV, are spending their time glued to computer monitors, video games, and the TV. They think in sound bites. They do not read as much as previous generations, and their vocabularies are sometimes limited to a point that seems appalling to their elders. I was reading Charlotte’s Web and short stories from a 1950s Childcraft to my niece and nephews and found myself translating words that children 40 years ago must have known. It was particularly depressing to have to explain that a pirate’s booty has nothing to do with ‘‘shake your booty.’’ What I have come to realize is that we have a generation gap in physiology teaching, just as we have a generation gap in so much of our daily society. What has happened in the last 30 years to create such dramatic changes? In my opinion, the rapid advances in technology and the concomitant information explosion have had a direct impact on what and how we teach. As our scientific knowledge base expanded rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, faculty were faced first with keeping current, and then with having to incorporate the new information into their teaching. Textbooks became thicker and thicker, and, for the first time in history, we knew more than we could possibly hope to teach within the confines of a structured physiology course. Where would it all end?