Hey everyone,
I don't think there's an existing thread on this so I'm going to post this here and I'll let the mods move it to the appropriate place if need be. You may not be aware, but very recently a project I have been following very closely now for the past two years has come to fruition called "AnkiHub". Basically, it's a form of collaborative Anki decks which allows users to create base decks and then various "subscribers" to the decks all receive constant synced updates. All subscribers can also suggest changes to the deck, suggest cards to add/remove and altogether comment/provide feedback on suggested changes. Think of it as a Wikipedia for Anki cards (anyone can suggest edits). A team of dedicated deck moderators will then sort through these recommended changes and decide what to update/add before these changes are published and synced to all the subscribers. You can read more about this on the Reddit post here and here. There is a US$5/month subscription fee to use AnkiHub, but given the enormous amount of coding and software involved, I honestly think this is a small price to pay for what it actually does. And before you yell at me, for full disclosure - I have absolutely no financial interest in the project nor have been told to advertise anything by anyone involved in AnkiHub - I am genuinely interested in this project and believe it has the potential to change medical education for the better. The rest of Anki is open source and indeed the creator of AnkiHub has been very vocal about his opposition to monetization in the interests of ultimately advancing medical knowledge globally. The creator has also stated that he and his team are looking at implementing a freemium model so people will not need to pay to access the base features, but it is still very early stages.
The main reason why this software is so exciting is because as far as I'm aware there's no dedicated "Australian-specific" Medicine Anki deck like there is in the US, and this is largely because we don't have standardized exams across medical schools. The closest thing to it was the huge "DOPE" deck, made by a UOND (I think?) med student a few years back, but even this deck was based heavily on US resources, and it also hasn't received updates since it was released. Also, the renowned AnKing deck which a lot of our US medical student counterparts use is based very heavily on US management/investigation guidelines with imperial units, making it somewhat problematic to use for us over here. Many of the "fields" in the AnKing Step1/2 Anki cards all have sources from US resources (such as Sketchy, OME, First Aid for the USMLE) that the vast majority of us would never use. That being said, it is a fantastic base resource, particularly the pathophysiology/microbiology cards, although much of it goes beyond the scope of what most of us over here are actually ever expected to learn. If you don't know what Anki is, I do apologise that you're probably sitting here very confused about what I'm going on about. I would strongly suggest you have a read around online into what it is, because there has been extensive research showing that spaced repetition (the fundamental principle of Anki) is one of the most effective and efficient ways of learning and retaining knowledge. Hence its popularity in particular for medical students.
So this is why I'm making this post - I am looking for a handful of dedicated volunteers across medical students in Australia to help me put together an Aussie version of the AnKing deck, with some modified fields for the AnKing cards to input the relevant Australian-specific data; ie. eTG Complete (for management), Talley O'Connor (for clinical features/physical exam stuff), RACGP Management (many good flowcharts for screening, etc. particularly in the Red Book), Up To Date (if eTG is too verbose), Textbook (ie. from Robbin's Pathology, Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine and other English/Australian resources us Australian medical students are told to read) to replace the existing AnKing US-specific card fields. The great thing about this project is that the cards can be continually updated as new management guidelines drop, based on a process of constant peer review as more medical students use and scrutinize the deck, as has been the case with the US AnKing deck. A mix of preclinical and clinical students would be ideal, as invariably the content will vary across these domains. I also have some plans down the track to try and get a team of clinicians interested in the project to act as moderators for the deck to also add an extra set of quality assurance that the content we're learning is actually right. I have still not yet decided whether I will use the AnKing deck with its 30,000 cards as a template for this new AU-based medical school deck and go through the process of mass editing to fit AU-guidelines or whether to simply start fresh creating new cards separated into a preclinical and clinical section, all tagged to the relevant course. In response to a comment I made on the Reddit post above discussing this proposal using the AnkiHub software, the creator also said he has intentions of eventually working on implementing a "forking" feature, where changes made to the US decks are also sent to other decks using the modified country-specific base cards, but he said this is probably "6 months" away.
This project will no doubt take some time, but my ultimate goal is to spend the rest of this year taking on board feedback and planning the approach, start putting the deck together during the first half of next year and ultimately have something of a V1.0 release by mid next year, with constant updates once we push along. This gives AnkiHub's software engineers time to iron out many of the bugs which are inevitably hiding in the software as it's in its very early developmental stages. Ultimately, I just wanted to make this post to gauge interest (if any) so I can start to get a team together this year!
I've just set up a Discord server to join where we can discuss logistics if you're interested in hearing more about the project: Join the AnKing Australia AnkiHub Project Discord Server!. Cheers!
I don't think there's an existing thread on this so I'm going to post this here and I'll let the mods move it to the appropriate place if need be. You may not be aware, but very recently a project I have been following very closely now for the past two years has come to fruition called "AnkiHub". Basically, it's a form of collaborative Anki decks which allows users to create base decks and then various "subscribers" to the decks all receive constant synced updates. All subscribers can also suggest changes to the deck, suggest cards to add/remove and altogether comment/provide feedback on suggested changes. Think of it as a Wikipedia for Anki cards (anyone can suggest edits). A team of dedicated deck moderators will then sort through these recommended changes and decide what to update/add before these changes are published and synced to all the subscribers. You can read more about this on the Reddit post here and here. There is a US$5/month subscription fee to use AnkiHub, but given the enormous amount of coding and software involved, I honestly think this is a small price to pay for what it actually does. And before you yell at me, for full disclosure - I have absolutely no financial interest in the project nor have been told to advertise anything by anyone involved in AnkiHub - I am genuinely interested in this project and believe it has the potential to change medical education for the better. The rest of Anki is open source and indeed the creator of AnkiHub has been very vocal about his opposition to monetization in the interests of ultimately advancing medical knowledge globally. The creator has also stated that he and his team are looking at implementing a freemium model so people will not need to pay to access the base features, but it is still very early stages.
The main reason why this software is so exciting is because as far as I'm aware there's no dedicated "Australian-specific" Medicine Anki deck like there is in the US, and this is largely because we don't have standardized exams across medical schools. The closest thing to it was the huge "DOPE" deck, made by a UOND (I think?) med student a few years back, but even this deck was based heavily on US resources, and it also hasn't received updates since it was released. Also, the renowned AnKing deck which a lot of our US medical student counterparts use is based very heavily on US management/investigation guidelines with imperial units, making it somewhat problematic to use for us over here. Many of the "fields" in the AnKing Step1/2 Anki cards all have sources from US resources (such as Sketchy, OME, First Aid for the USMLE) that the vast majority of us would never use. That being said, it is a fantastic base resource, particularly the pathophysiology/microbiology cards, although much of it goes beyond the scope of what most of us over here are actually ever expected to learn. If you don't know what Anki is, I do apologise that you're probably sitting here very confused about what I'm going on about. I would strongly suggest you have a read around online into what it is, because there has been extensive research showing that spaced repetition (the fundamental principle of Anki) is one of the most effective and efficient ways of learning and retaining knowledge. Hence its popularity in particular for medical students.
So this is why I'm making this post - I am looking for a handful of dedicated volunteers across medical students in Australia to help me put together an Aussie version of the AnKing deck, with some modified fields for the AnKing cards to input the relevant Australian-specific data; ie. eTG Complete (for management), Talley O'Connor (for clinical features/physical exam stuff), RACGP Management (many good flowcharts for screening, etc. particularly in the Red Book), Up To Date (if eTG is too verbose), Textbook (ie. from Robbin's Pathology, Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine and other English/Australian resources us Australian medical students are told to read) to replace the existing AnKing US-specific card fields. The great thing about this project is that the cards can be continually updated as new management guidelines drop, based on a process of constant peer review as more medical students use and scrutinize the deck, as has been the case with the US AnKing deck. A mix of preclinical and clinical students would be ideal, as invariably the content will vary across these domains. I also have some plans down the track to try and get a team of clinicians interested in the project to act as moderators for the deck to also add an extra set of quality assurance that the content we're learning is actually right. I have still not yet decided whether I will use the AnKing deck with its 30,000 cards as a template for this new AU-based medical school deck and go through the process of mass editing to fit AU-guidelines or whether to simply start fresh creating new cards separated into a preclinical and clinical section, all tagged to the relevant course. In response to a comment I made on the Reddit post above discussing this proposal using the AnkiHub software, the creator also said he has intentions of eventually working on implementing a "forking" feature, where changes made to the US decks are also sent to other decks using the modified country-specific base cards, but he said this is probably "6 months" away.
This project will no doubt take some time, but my ultimate goal is to spend the rest of this year taking on board feedback and planning the approach, start putting the deck together during the first half of next year and ultimately have something of a V1.0 release by mid next year, with constant updates once we push along. This gives AnkiHub's software engineers time to iron out many of the bugs which are inevitably hiding in the software as it's in its very early developmental stages. Ultimately, I just wanted to make this post to gauge interest (if any) so I can start to get a team together this year!
I've just set up a Discord server to join where we can discuss logistics if you're interested in hearing more about the project: Join the AnKing Australia AnkiHub Project Discord Server!. Cheers!
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