ICON Training Program

As part of the Harvard Interfaculty Neuroscience Program, a new learning
tool called ICON, an interactive case-based online network, has been introduced
to the Faculty of Medicine. It is about the learning process, not the
technology. We migrated ICON and its learning modules into the Human Nervous
System and Behavior (HNSB) tutorial curriculum of HMS second year students
from the Francis Weld Peabody Society.

Building upon traditional pedagogy and patient-centered educational objectives
in medical education, we modeled ICON to integrate case content with discussion
allowing students and faculty to collaborate and communicate online in
a variety of novel ways. ICON is fundamentally designed not to replace
these interactions but to enhance the entire collaborative experience
of learning between students and faculty.

ICON is user driven, not content driven. To emphasize this point, students
develop a “working team” approach to case learning within
a framework of process that can be adapted to suit the particular learning
needs of the student. The ICON team model of student-faculty synergy is
one aspect of this framework enabling students and faculty to work in
a collective dynamic of interdependent multidisciplinary roles. As a result,
the ICON tutorial finds itself grounded in a new dimension of synergy:
active participation of faculty in the student’s learning.

Bringing together faculties from the Harvard Medical School, Harvard
School of Dental Medicine, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Business
School, and Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, ICON facilitates active
learning across specialties of neurobiology, neuroscience, neurology,
psychiatry, and neurosurgery allowing students to interact with virtual
patients, to share hypotheses with colleagues, to explore the science
behind disease, and to address issues of ethics and healthcare in the
reality of the patient’s world.

Similarly, faculty who actively participate as “virtual patients”
and serve as colleagues to students online find that ICON enhances the
short amount of time spent together in the tutorial classroom. Taken together,
ICON is a mutual investment of student-faculty synergy advancing the case
method to the forefront in a 24-hour, self-directed learning platform.