The field of professional medical continuing education is changing rapidly. The traditional format for continuing education for health care professionals has long been classroom learning. This form of learning has been found to be relatively ineffective in changing learners’ practice patterns. The reasons most often cited are that there is little interaction and that the learning does not occur when the learner is ready to learn. Interaction greatly enhances retention and the tendency for the learner to later apply the learning in actual clinical encounters. There are a growing number of online continuing medical education (CME) Web sites that combine on-demand didactic presentations with the ability to discuss the content with peers. The easy access and interaction potential of this new CME media promises to improve the effectiveness of future CME.
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