MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

At the beginning of May around 500 delegates gathered in Sestri Levante, a quiet fishing town on the beautiful Portofino coast, Northern Italy for the 2004 eLearning Results1 meeting.

Now in its second year, the conference organised by Giunti Interactive Labs brings together industry leaders, academics and government agencies to share case studies and discuss good practice in the field of e-learning standards.

The meeting offered a refreshing change from the usual navel-gazing often associated with e-learning standards meetings and instead focussed on success stories of standards adoption.

The standards bodies themselves were well represented with delegates from IMS, SCORM, AICC and the UK's own CETIS in attendance. Medicine and health sciences were well-represented as this year as AMEE2 was a co-sponsor.

The medical and health strand featured presentations that discussed learning outcomes, e-portfolios, assessment, training and collaboration, all subjects familiar to regular AMEE goers but in Sestri Levante the issues took a more technical twist with talk of interoperability standards, both present and emerging.

It became clear to this conference delegate that the present crop of e-learning standards only address some of the issues of interest to medical educators, and even then perhaps only the more technical aspects of content exchange.

For standards to really take root in medical education the areas of reflective learning, electronic portfolios and professional competency need the standards touch.

New standards, as yet to be defined, that govern the creation and operation of multimedia learning tools such as virtual patients and how these communicate with electronic patient record systems are also needed.

This view of information management that starts with the classroom and ends with the consulting room is as yet unexplored by the standards bodies.

A major presence in Sestri Levante were IVIMEDS3 and Medbiquitous4, two consortia that aim to bring together much of the debate about e-learning standards in medical education, training and practice by bringing together like-minded institutions, both professional and academic.

IVIMEDS in particular is positioning itself to act as a focal point for e-learning standards in medical education.

As a paid-up member of IMS, IVIMEDS will give a voice to the seldom heard medical expert on the standards-making bodies.

For those poor souls who were left at home on May exams duty and were unable to spend time in the lovely fishing town of Sestri Levante the conference web site is well worth a visit.

Streaming video of all presentations as well as PowerPoint slides are now online. It's just like being there in person. Well, Ok, maybe not, but it's the next best thing until eLearning Results 2005.

Dr David A Davies (d.a.davies@bham.ac.uk), Medical Education Unit, The University of Birmingham.