Project Year: 2003
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 Kathleen Sun.
rmd Studio’s role was to develop a prototypical online Learning Management System (LMS) which could be accessed by healthcare 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 healthcare 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.