An open repositories network development for medical teaching resources.

The lack of interoperability between repositories of heterogeneous and geographically widespread data is an obstacle to the diffusion, sharing and reutilization of those data. We present the development of an open repositories network taking into account both the syntactic and semantic interoperability of the different repositories and based on international standards in this field. The network is used by the medical community in France for the diffusion and sharing of digital teaching resources. The syntactic interoperability of the repositories is managed using the OAI-PMH protocol for the exchange of metadata describing the resources. Semantic interoperability is based, on one hand, on the LOM standard for the description of resources and on MESH for the indexing of the latter and, on the other hand, on semantic interoperability management designed to optimize compliance with standards and the quality of the metadata.

Enhancing a medical e-learning environment: the adaptive DI2@DEM approach.

Current medical e-learning tools suffer from a variability of student user. Students are different in terms of motivations, training backgrounds, technical skills and learning objectives. It is obvious that these students do not accede relevant information if their educational resources access is misadapted. Adaptive environments propose to take the user into account in order to provide him or her with the most relevant educational resources. We present the adaptive DI(2)ADEM approach, which enhances the MEDIDACTE e-learning environment of the Faculty of Medicine in Marseille. DI(2)ADEM objective is to select the most relevant information and offer it to the user in an adaptive manner. Adaptability is based on management of knowledge regarding both the user and resources distributed. A match is made between student's profile and knowledge of resources organization and semantics.

Experimenting with new paradigms for medical education and the emergence of a distance learning degree using the internet: teaching evidence-based medicine.

This paper is focused on designing and developing a teaching environment associated with an introductory course in evidence-based medicine designed for undergraduates. Attempting to break away from the traditional educational model based on acquisition of factual knowledge, we developed a software tool centred on content management, student assessment and feedback. We ran this course on an educational website, using chat rooms and electronic mail for trainer-trainee communication over one academic year. The website served as a repository for knowledge and information and presented freestanding web-based interactive study modules and a non-interactive degree course. Trainers and trainees responded favourably to the computer applications and the Internet. This project demonstrated the feasibility of computer-aided learning and the advantages of distance teaching over the Internet.