Dr Peter Bloemendaal from Leiden University Medical School talks about Medicaleducation.nl, an online e-learning resources for medical students in The Netherlands.
This websites facilitates the distribution and sharing of medical resources. As Peter explains: “We started the project about five years ago, and now we have more than 1200 e-learning modules in our database.”
These resources are freely available to those in the medical community. This resource is managed via a distributive administration system.
“Every university medical centre has its own administrators, and can put their own e-learning tools into the database,” says Peter. “These resources are then distributed to the university students, or all medical students in The Netherlands.”
Using this system, students have access to a wide range of information. “Before, students only had access to their institutions. But now they have access to resources from all eight of our medical centres,” he says.
This collaborative effort is hugely popular, and continues to grow. “We have more than 25,000 users in the database, and we’re seeing an increase in the usage from last year,” says Peter.
One valuable advantage of this system is that medical educators can analyse any trends in how students use the e-learning resources, and students are also given the opportunity to leave comments and feedback. As Peter explains: “We can use this system to see what students are doing with their el-earning tools, and you can also look at what grades they got with the different tools.” Clearly this system can be used to help medical educators continuously improve their e-learning resources.
Peter is enthusiastic about other collaborative e-learning programmes, including eViP. When asked if he would use eViP virtual patients, the answer was a resounding yes! “I would very much like to see eViP in medical education,” he says. “That would be great because all the eViP cases could be distributed throughout The Netherlands.”
You can listen to Peter talk to eViP about MedicalEducation.nl here:
