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Providing Medical Education Resources Over the World Wide Web
Background
Joan Freedman M.S
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
freedman@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu
Harold Lehmann, M.D., Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
freedman@welchgate.welch.jhu.edu
Medical education differs from most higher-education programs in that during the first two years of training
students take a set-sequence of basic science lectures and labs. The third and fourth years are spent rotating
through an elective sequence of clinical and inpatient services throughout the city. Due to the unique nature of
learning medicine through patient care, it is difficult to insure all students exposure to patients with all
diseases. As it is important to insure that students have timely access to educational materials to supplement
the clinical experience, the World Wide Web was the logical choice for distributing educational materials.
LectureLinks is a distance learning framework comprising Web links that assist students at Hopkins in
accessing educationally relevant resources that exist both within and outside of the institution. For each course
lecture notes, old exams, Web-based CAI (computer-assisted instruction) materials were gathered and
uploaded to the file server. In addition to resources created at Hopkins, students have identified external links
to sites that contain materials relevant to their studies. By collecting these resources and organizing them in
searchable, lecture-by-lecture format, students are exposed to a wider range of educational materials than they
would normally have time to seek out.
This project was created as a response to students plea for relevant, timely computer-based programs to
enhance and assist their learning and to provide options other than those assigned by the faculty. Since
medical students have great demands put on them, they often do not have time to “surf” the Web or to seek out
relevant and appropriate software resources on their own. Moreover, faculty members have used LectureLinks
to see what other faculty members are teaching. Over the twelve months that LectureLinks has been running,
it has become the de facto distance learning framework for the medical school curriculum.
Design
Begun as a series of manually managed HTML files, the LectureLinks framework has been redesigned to make
it generalizable and to be usable in any higher education discipline. A set of databases and server scripts have
been created to facilitate and to automate the updating process of LectureLinks (or any set of Web pages with
many changing links). These scripts automatically update the database and recreate the HTML pages from the
database.
The kernel of this design is the recognition that LectureLinks represents a database that matches resources to
educational activities (see Figure 1). The database reflects this distinction by representing information about
activities separately from resources. Activities can be nested, or be part of other activities (e.g. a lab is part of a
course which is part of a year.). Resources can be local, as in lecture notes, or remote, as in Web sites at other
institutions.
Information about the curriculum is entered into the LectureLinks Educational Activity table and updated as
courses, lectures, and schedules change. This table contains the following information: activity type (lecture,