Health professionals need to constantly keep up with the latest scientific and medical research in order to stay current in their practice. The problem is, these people have very little time to constantly look for viable information resources or they often have to work in remote isolated geographical areas where academic institutions and knowledge organizations aren't easily accessible.

In May 2001, the Vice-Presidents Advisory Council (VPAC) formed the Telelearning Subcommittee (TS) consisting of representatives from each of five British Columbian Universities ( UNBC , UVIC , UBC , SFU , and RRU ) to address those issues by exploring online learning methodologies and technologies for the health professionals who are seeking workshops, courses, and programs offered by the participating universities.

Two of the committee members in our team were Dr. Patrick Mann from UNBC, and Dr. Francis Lau from UVIC. Project Management and System Analysis were done by Miss Kathleen Sun.

Rastin Mehr's responsibility as the Web Application Architect was to develop a prototypical online Learning Management System (LMS) which could be accessed by the health care professionals online, and be maintained by administrators from each participating university.

Using this web application, administrators could enter academic courses from different universities, and then combine the existing courses to create programs, workshops, and seminars.

This way health care professionals could access the information they required using a centralized database on the web and then contact the associated universities for further arrangements.

The Telelearning-in-health prototype was developed and tested within 4 months during the summer of 2003.

Some Technical Details

The VPAC Tele-learning was written in php version 4.3.* and it was using an Oracle SQL database. Application followed a 3 tiered Model View Controller (MVC) type of architecture, by using Data Manager, VDRO, and Page Maker classes. Other features in this application were as following:

• IMS standard compliant Learning Management features for constructing courses, seminars, workshops, and programs.
• User Profile Management
• Access Control List (ACL) for learners, data providers, administrators, and Super Administrators.
• Built-in Search Engin

VPAC Telelearning application was hosted and kept on UNBC servers, and unfortunately we do not have any screen shots of the user interfaces, although some UML diagrams are included in this portfolio piece. 

Credits

I would like to thank the following wonderful people who participated in this very fun project during the 4 months of our collaboration:

• Dr. Patrick Mann – Director of Computer and Telecommunication Services
• Dr. Francis Lau - Associate Professor, and graduate advisor at UVIC
• Kathleen Sun - Project Manager, System Analyst, Usability Testing
• Monika - Data Entry and Usability Testing