Doctors online: Learning using an internet based content management system

The past century has seen spectacular gains in the breadth and depth of medical knowledge, but the potential of these gains has been hampered by a slow system of disseminating knowledge. Over the course of medical education numerous technologies and methods have been used to deliver continuing medical education (CME) to health care professionals (HCPs). These methods have included postal correspondence, two-way radio conferencing, video conferencing and in the last decade the Internet. The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s, coupled with increasing computer processing power, reduced computing costs and more creative content management systems have led to more CME materials and resources going 'online'. This has in turn greatly sped up the dissemination of medical knowledge. This paper reports on a contemporary study that assessed the pedagogical and instructional design (e-pedagogy) effectiveness of online CME courses offered by one large Australasian continuing education provider.