H I LS

My name is Lambert. I am passionate about education and learning. Even though I come from a medical background - I studied medicine in the Netherlands a very long time ago - my passion is health professions education and assessment. My main work is in developing assessment programs that support students in their learning an helping to become the best health professional they can be. So, I truly believe that assessment for learning does not only lead to better competence and performance at the time of graduation but also for much longer afterwards. As the literature shows, your degree will gain you entry into the labour market, but the quality of you learning is what makes you successful in the labour market (yes, even if you measure success by income earned). But unfortunately, there are quite some myths about learning. The most important one is that learning can be made easy. Sorry, it cannot!!! If you want to be a top musician or an elite athlete, you will need to put in the work, and that work is not always easy or fun. So, if you want to become a top healthcare professional, you will also have to put in the work. But again, like in music or sports, better is NOT always more. Better means using better "training" methods, better study methods. That is what this website is about and the post with advice on the study coach page are aimed at better, even if some advice may seem counter intuitive. That is my passion, bringing the evidence about successful learning to practice (with the help of HPE-bot)

I wish I had all the modern technology available when I was a medical student 40 years ago. Studying was so much different. Modern students have access to information through the internet, open access publications, wikis and open libraries. They also have access to instruction. If you want to know more about anything in healthcare it is easy to find an online presentation, lecture or animated video for free. Modern students can be part of many online study groups, they can communicate with people from all over the world for practically free. They can create the most beautiful artefacts for their learning, their own podcasts, videos, animations, AI-powered mind maps. And all that can be done through a single device. So, it is easy to think that modern students have it so much easier than I had it 40 years ago. But I don't think that is true at all. When I was a student I could trust the information I was given. I could trust that my lectures had content that was true and up-to-date, that the books I used were quality assured, that the papers I read were from reputable journals. That is no longer the case. Online lectures may be appealing but may contain incorrect information, social media posts may give false information, predatory journals may put our publications that are dodgy and many more sources of misinformation exist. Modern students, therefore, have to be more critical than ever. I think that modern technology does not dumb down the students, but requires them to be even more critical thinkers than I ever had to be. While I could simply follow the course and the lectures, modern students need to construct their own learning more actively. This requires them to be self-directed and self-regulated, which is not always easy. That is why this website contains posts about how to learn efficiently and effectively and how to use HPE-bot for this. But we would love to hear from all users about how they are learning with the bot. It would be exciting to have a community of learners and learn from each other. As George Bernard Shaw one said: if you have an apple and I have one and we exchange apples, we will still each have only one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, we will both have two ideas.