Lecturio is one of the most well-known medical student resources, and until recently, one that I was entirely unfamiliar with. I’m excited to get a chance to explore the online platform and share some of my experiences with you, because I frequently get questions about whether or not I recommend it.
Let’s dive right in.
What is Lecturio?
It’s an online platform that has two main pillars: the video library and the question bank. It covers the basic sciences and clinical medicine, and to my surprise, it also includes prep material for other exams (like COMLEX and MBBS), and it has preclinical material in two other languages! For those who are pursuing the USMLE-pathway, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about q-banks, and Lecturio’s is one of the options out there. I’ll go into more detail about each of the main components and elaborate on all the added features as we go along.
Confession time: I DID use Lecturio once, in second year. I remember a dreary December day sitting in the library, trying against all odds to wrap my head around the cranial nerves (pun intended), and a friend of mine recommended I watch the Lecturio videos on it. I felt like I didn’t have too much time but I decided to give it a shot. I specifically remember that the video on CN8 just clicked, and I felt like neuro fell into place. But anyway, back to the topic at hand.
Full disclosure – this post is sponsored by the team at Lecturio. I want you to know that these opinions are my own, and if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I express my honest thoughts about resources I use, sponsored or not. Thank you for reading — I’d be nowhere without your support.
Who would I recommend Lecturio for?
- any student who feels like their teaching in a certain course/year was not enough, and wants a comprehensive overview
- any student who learns well from videos (auditory+visual)
- any student who likes a well-structured, easy-to-follow ‘course’ in medicine
- any student preparing for the USMLE exams (great as an extra question bank,
- any student who feels like they want to apply their knowledge in clinical scenarios and ‘learn by doing’
Despite what you may think, Lecturio isn’t only for the people preparing for the USMLEs — I believe it can be beneficial for anyone who fits the above, whether or not you’re pursuing the Step exams.
To get started, I recommend signing up for a free account (click here). This will allow you to explore the platform a bit and get a feeling for their lecture style,
Some universities purchase institutional licenses for their students, so definitely check with your school. If you are interested in purchasing a subscription, you can use the code AMEDSTUDENTSJOURNEY35 (non-affiliate) for 35% off their 1 year or 3 month premium accounts.
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Lecturio Features / User Interface
The online platform is really well-designed and has a lot of little details that make it pleasant to use. For example, I can add any video I want to my Study Planner, and can even schedule a specific date for it. This is great because sometimes when I’m not in the mood to cover a certain topic, I forget to go back to it… and then never review it. Oops.
Here’s a list of the key features:
- Study Planner
- Question of the Day
- iOS and Android apps (with OFFLINE access)
- Med School Survival Guide (a series of advice-style videos giving tips for each phase for your med school journey)
- Practice Tests (in the Exam Prep tab, you can take practice tests for board and shelf exams, follow a pre-made Step study schedule, or study by subject)
- Video “Quiz” Questions (each video has a few short quiz questions at the end that aim to test retention of the key points of the video — this is completely different than the question bank, and it uses a spaced-repetition algorithm to repeat missed questions in time)
- Notes (where ALL the notes you took on videos are aggregated, so you don’t have to go flipping back through the material for that)
Video Library
If you’re a visual learner like I am, you use videos to study. I love having a well-organized, easy-to-follow video course and Lecturio definitely delivers. There are a few features that are included in the video library that make it overall a great experience. But let’s start at the beginning:
The video library is organized by exam (like USMLE Step 1, Step 2, COMLEX, etc.) and further into the core subjects or topics. For instance, for the USMLE Step 2 CK exam, the subjects include internal med, family med, OBGYN, pediatrics, surgery and EM. Each subject has multiple topics and a handy ‘progress’ tracker, so for instance, I can see that i’m 8% of the way through the EM videos.
Videos are in a “lecturer + presentation slides” format; each video has an accompanying transcript, as well as downloadable slides. This means that you don’t have to take notes as you go along if you don’t want to. There’s also a NOTES feature which is really advanced — as you’re watching a video, you can ‘add a note’ and it will time-stamp the part of the video that you added it to. You can then see ALL your notes (a feature I was hoping Lecturio would have) on the “Notes” tab, so you can find all the little notes you’ve taken (see picture below).
The videos are often quite short and thus feel very manageable. They’re broken down into bite-size topics which is GREAT if you’re like me — you feel like you’ve got one part of a topic down but continue to struggle with another section. They often separate their videos into TOPIC, TOPIC: DIAGNOSIS, TOPIC: TREATMENT, which I love because I tend to struggle with the management/treatment portion and can go directly to that video, without spending precious time watching something I already feel confident in. I attached a picture of the Acute Care section in Family Medicine, where you can see how each pathology is addressed in multiple videos, allowing you to focus your study sessions.
Each video is followed by a few questions. These aren’t the USMLE-style (patient vignette, multi-step) questions that we see in the qbank (see below), but rather short quiz questions that test retention. These are nice in the sense that you can check if you actually paid attention to the video, but you’re also free to skip them if you want.
articles under Family Medicine.
If you feel like reading more about a topic, there are also Articles connected to certain subjects, so that you can go more into depth. To get an idea of the types of topics covered in the Articles section of the video library, I’ve screenshotted the section under Family Medicine –> Acute Care. I love that they emphasize the truly important topics, the things that come up a lot within each subject.
Question Bank
Questions are the crux of preparing for standardized board exams. When discussing things that mostly correlate to USMLE score, for example, it is often said that the number of questions one does is the strongest correlate out of all other resources. Solving questions in your preparation for a given exam is the absolute best way to learn.
Lecturio has 2205 questions for the USMLE Step 1 exam, and 2101 questions for the Step 2 CK exam. As usual, you can approach questions in timed and/or tutor mode (there are benefits to both), and create customs tests based on subjects and systems.
Here is an example of a question taken straight from the Step 2 CK qbank, just to give you an idea of what board-style questions look like. Once you submit your answer, you can read the explanation for why the right answer is correct, and why the wrongs ones aren’t. The user interface looks exactly like the Free 120 questions (NBME style), which gets you accustomed to the format and layout. There are a few little differences, which I’ll list here:
- Auto-translate: you can automatically translate the questions to your native language, so if you’re not studying for the Step exams and just want to use these questions to test yourself, you can approach the study material in your own language (note: it’s auto-translate so it might not be a perfect translation, but it’s still quite powerful)
- Book references + associated video: for each question, you can quickly jump to the related theory without having to flip through the pages or search through the catalog for the relevant video explanations.
The major difference is that you can’t ‘suspend’ a test: you can either end it or continue it. I don’t know if they plan on making an update to this in future versions (because, as someone who sometimes studies in chaotic surroundings, I often use the ‘suspend’ feature if I know I won’t be able to complete the session), but we shall see.
Bookmatcher
This feature is mind-boggling… I don’t really get how Lecturio pulled it off because, wow. It actually missed my notice the first few times I was using Lecturio, and it wasn’t until @just_me_studying pointed it out to me that I realized it was there all along.
Bookmatcher is a revolutionary feature that allows you to match your textbook page to video(s) in the Lecturio library. It has about 25 of the most popular medical textbooks listed, and you input the page number that you’re studying, and it automatically pulls up the videos that are related to the topics on that page. How cool is that?
How I’m Using Lecturio
I already took Step 1, so I won’t be using most of the basic sciences material. I am currently preparing for the second part of the USMLE exam series, the Clinical Knowledge test (Step 2 CK). I won’t have the time to go through the entire video library, and so I will be focusing my efforts on those courses that I felt were not as well-taught. For me specifically, these are:
- general surgery (3.5 hours)
- obstetrics (3.3 hours)
I will also watch videos on the things that I continue to get wrong, which tend to be things with fluids/electrolytes, acids/bases, ophthalmology and a few more. I will also watch the series on emergency medicine, because that’s what I want to go into, so a strong foundation is key.
Final words
Lecturio is such a comprehensive, all-encompassing resource for medical students and it’s been a joy to get to try out their platform for the purposes of this review. Going forward, I plan to watch their surgery, OBGYN and emergency medicine videos and do as many of the qbank questions as I can — after all, practice makes… better!
Some universities purchase institutional licenses for their students, so definitely check with your school. If you are interested in purchasing a subscription, you can use the code AMEDSTUDENTSJOURNEY35 (non-affiliate) for 35% off their 1 year or 3 month premium accounts.
Thank you for reading and I hope that was helpful! For more on my USMLE journey, you can follow me on Instagram. For a bit of insight into how I am preparing for my USMLE Step 2 CK exam, click here, and for a link to my podcast dedicated to USMLE Step 1, here you go!
If you have any questions, feel free to message me (as always) or shoot me an email via the contact me part of the blog!
