The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), Khan Academy, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) recently announced a new collaboration to provide free, online resources to help students prepare for the revised Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) that will be administered in 2015.To develop the new content, the three organizations will sponsor a competition to encourage medical students and residents to create educational tutorials (i.e., collections of videos, questions, and articles) about concepts that will be tested by the new MCAT exam.
Video submissions are now being accepted online, and the deadline for submissions is June 14, 2013. Khan Academy will review the videos and select the winners, who will receive an all-expenses-paid weeklong program as they are trained by Khan Academy staff and scholars. Trainees then will produce the new collection of tutorials on pre-health competencies. Full contest rules, submission guidelines, and criteria for entry can be found at http://www.khanacademy.org/about/med-competition.
The first tutorials for the new collection are expected to be available in the fall of 2013 through Khan Academy’s online learning library, as well as the Pre-health Collection of the AAMC’s MedEdPORTAL iCollaborative, a free, searchable online repository of instructional materials for teaching pre-health curricula.
Once developed, the new tutorials are intended to be especially helpful to students who cannot afford to take test preparation courses or who are enrolled in pre-health programs at institutions with limited resources.
Dr. Ronald Franks, vice president for health sciences at the University of South Alabama, served as vice chair of the MCAT revision committee that recommended the update to the exam. To learn more about the revised MCAT exam announced last year, click here.
