Neurological podcasting : A project by students for students

Podcasts are a very popular learning material among medical students. Currently only a few neurological podcasts exist, which do not include relevant neurological diseases or neuroanatomical contents. The primary objective of this project was to help medical students understand neurological topics and to integrate them into the educational program. The project started in 2014. The podcasts were written and produced by medical students. So far ten podcasts about neuroanatomy and clinical neurology have been created. The podcasts were published in summer 2015 at the University of Witten-Herdecke followed by an internal evaluation. In addition to questions about the listening experience and intelligibility, the students were asked to give an individual evaluation of the different topics and to express their opinion in a free text field. A total of 100 medical students participated. They listened to the podcasts in particular to prepare themselves for medical examinations (47.4 %) and because of a special interest in neurology (26.3 %). The different podcasts were mainly evaluated as "good" or "very good". Of the students 76.8 % wanted to listen to the podcasts again and 93 % planned to recommend the podcasts to friends. Only the length of some of the podcasts as well as technical faults were criticized and should be improved. The neurological podcasts of the University of Witten-Herdecke are a very successful and well-received project. The results of the survey will help to improve the next podcasts and integrate new topics. More than 15 new podcasts are being edited at the moment. The release date for the new podcasts will be in spring 2016.