Virtual Collaborative Medical Education in Medicine

This paper presents a novel approach towards virtual collaborative medical education, which aims to confront the problem of ever expanding core knowledge and the necessity of handling over-specialized disciplines in medical education. Already proven, general purpose web-based learning and collaboration tools are used to create a virtual education network among medical institutions. Over-specialized scientists from different institutions develop individually or in collaboration (over the web) self-contained and well targeted educational objects which are then combined dynamically on a virtual e-classroom on the web in order to form integrated educational units. Each such complete educational unit can be shaped to support either traditional expert instructed teaching and/or self-directed problem-based learning, enhancing the emerging patient-oriented approach to medical education. This approach provides a means for medical academic institutions to enrich their curricula with external overspecialized expert knowledge and facilitate exchange and subsequent convergence of medical curricula.