A method for interactive medical instruction utilizing the World Wide Web

Abstract

We describe the implementation of interactive medical teaching programs in radiology and histology which utilize the Internet's World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW standard hypertext interface allows for simple navigation between related documents but does not provide a method for student tracking or question queries. Electronic forms, a recent feature of the WWW, provide the means to present question documents to remote clients and track student performance. A feature of our approach is dynamic creation of HTML documents based upon interaction with database applications. The approach allows multiple simultaneous, yet asynchronous interactions by geographically dispersed students upon the same instructional database and is scalable, providing the capability for multiple image/document servers. The security of the database is assured given that it is not accessible through the Internet.