Online Learning environments for medical education: a case study

New and established medical schools around the world have been facing challenges and opportunities of increasingly diverse and distributed student groups, an expanded teaching population and the changing practice of medicine. This has led to re-visioning medical education curricula and the technologies that facilitate teacher and student interaction and delivery of curriculum resources. This paper provides an overview of how technology is being used in medical education to meet these new contexts. Of focus is a case study of the Online Learning Environment designed for a new medical school located in Australia. This school - at the University of Wollongong - has been established with a particular focus on regional and rural health. The school is located across two campuses and clinical experiences are provided for students in numerous, geographically dispersed locations in a range of health care settings. As a graduate-entry school, students are drawn from a variety of backgrounds. Similarly, the teaching staff brings a diversity of academic and health care expertise. The Online Learning Environment integrates a learning management system and a content management system. The environment has been designed to respond to: the vision of the school; the profile of its student body; staff background and teaching practices; and, the research base in online teaching and learning in higher education that has developed over more than a decade. The case study describes and evaluates the Online Learning Environment in terms of the criteria set down by the IMS Global Learning Consortium as setting up the potential for 'learning impact' - access; affordability; quality; adoption; accountability; organizational learning; interoperability; and innovation. The paper considers these criteria and how the Online Learning Environment addresses the criteria.