Find the right connections
DR MATT and Dr Mike describe their past selves as “not good students”, but the duo has achieved international media fame as health educators.
The Griffith University academics and researchers have amassed more than 1.2 million viewers a month on YouTube, plus more through podcasts, Twitter and TikTok, taking their monthly audience to more than 10 million.
Neuroscientist Dr Mike Todorovic said students related to him and his colleague, Dr Matt Barton, through their different approach to teaching.
“We weren’t actually good students at high school,” Dr Todorovic said. “We didn’t just pick these things up instantly.
“I taught the students a concept the way I learnt it myself and because it wasn’t inherently easy for me, I had to draw things, I had to create analogies, and that’s how I taught the students. They really appreciated that.
“It’s a path not many academics take because they’ve always been at the top of their field.”
This path has led them to pick up a prestigious Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Griffith University Citation for Excellence in Teaching, and a Pro Vice Chancellor’s staff excellence award for engagement.
The awards acknowledge their educational reach extending not just to the students attending the anatomy, physiology and pharmacology labs and pracs on campus, but to health professionals and the public across Australia and beyond.
A skim of their social media accounts includes plaudits from health professionals and keen learners around the world.
A UK physician recommends them as “superb teachers” and the “all-time fav for basic sciences and medicine” while a health consumer from the US describes them as “toptier when it comes to exploring and explaining the human body in a way that makes its complexities a little easier – and fun – to understand”.
In 2016, the colleagues started posting key points from their lectures as short bursts in videos uploaded to the most user-friendly platform at the time, YouTube.
They could see the two-hour lectures were not being watched in full, with important elements skipped.
“You don’t present information from most important to least, the last 20 minutes is just as important as the first 20 minutes,” Dr Todorovic.
“Let’s just take those important concepts and just record them separately as a short video.”
They say they believe this personalised approach to learning and education will be the new frontier.
“Technology is rapidly changing and the universities are trying to keep up with that,” Dr Barton said. “We see education as transformative, you provide them with education and skills that will change their world. It is an inspiring profession to have. Universities need to be mindful of not making it transactional.”
“Technology has decentralised and democratised education,” Dr Todorovic said.
“Everyone has access to information, but the difficulty is that they equally have access to disinformation. We need experts to be online.”