Collaborative environment for clinical reasoning and distance learning sessions

摘要

Background: The medical curriculum has changed with the adoption of the student-centered learning paradigm. Clinical reasoning learning (CRL) is used in order to develop and improve students' clinical reasoning and problem-solving skills. Purpose: We have observed that, in complement to traditional CRL sessions, students commonly consult resources available on the internet. Based on this observation, our objective is to create computer tools to coordinate CRL sessions at distance, integrating these electronic resources at every step of the reasoning process. Material and methods: In order to create the system, we elaborated an object-oriented model of a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. The proposed system includes a local web-server to store electronic resources and a relational database to store their electronic addresses (urls). JAVAT was used as the programming language. Results: We developed a set of cooperative platform-independent tools. This environment includes a communication tool. Multimedia data exchange is possible. Information is shared thanks to an electronic notepad and whiteboard tools. Perspectives: This learning environment will be integrated in the French Virtual Medical University project, and is intended to be used for undergraduate, internships, residency or continuing medical education.