I recently finished the first of three classes on searching Medline for medical students. I confess I set them up to fail in the first part of the class. Previously when I taught Medline, I found that if I jumped right in and told them everything about Medline and walked them through searching step by step, they fell asleep. They are medical students they have mastered the art of sleeping with their eyes open.
So, right away I give them a simple topic to search using Medline and tell them to start searching. Wow it is interesting to see the methods they come up with. After they muddle through and "finish" the search they begin to compare results with each other and wonder why some got 88,567 results while others got 2. That is when I step in and begin to teach. I explain to them that searching Medline is NOT searching Google. Google is great for a lot of things but you can't use the same search strategies on Medline. So far so good, at least they seemed to be awake.
We will see how it all works after the last class.