The use of virtual patients to assess the clinical skills and reasoning of medical students: initial insights on student acceptance.

Background: Web-based clinical cases ("virtual patients", VPs) provide the potential for valid, cost-effective teaching and assessment of clinical skills, especially clinical reasoning skills, of medical students. However, medical students must embrace this teaching and assessment modality for it to be adopted widely.

Method: We examined student acceptance of a web-based VP system, Web-SP, developed for teaching and assessment purposes, in a group of 15 second-year and 12 fourth-year medical students.

Building an internationalized content delivery architecture: lessons learned.

Increasingly, small development teams are building internationalized architectures for delivering large amounts of content. The AIM e-Learning project is one such example: in 2 years, 4 people built a system which currently delivers the print equivalent of 1500 pages of text, in 4 languages, to users in over 140 countries world wide. Here we discuss the lessons we have learned through development, including issues surrounding staffing, process, technologies and next steps.

The Advanced Immunization Management (AIM) e-Learning Project.

New tools to educate immunization managers in developing countries are needed to keep these health policy makers current on the latest vaccines and procedures, and to provide support in decision making. The goal of the AIM e-Learning Project is to deliver up-to-date and engaging web-delivered media, with solid instructional design, to an audience relatively new to web-based learning. Accuracy of information and accessibility drive our design.