Background: The Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, has developed a shareable virtual patients application to support clinical teaching. Summary of work: The application provides a user-friendly interface and the necessary tools to generate virtual patient cases and share them with partner organisations using common learning standards. It supports the delivery of traditional learning, by introducing problem-based scenarios focused on clinical or general practice. Cases can be exported as HTML or SCORM shareable content objects, making them interoperable with different learning platforms, such as WebCT and Moodle. International partners will access the application in their own languages using simple development and deployment tools that make the virtual patients easily transferable.Summary of results: Over 100 virtual patients have already been developed, classified under topics such as: cardiology, cancer medicine, dermatology, neurology, medicine for the elderly and general practice. Conclusions: The capability of a common standard conformant application across partners that is available in their own language provides an effective mechanism to author and share virtual patients that can be deployed on different virtual learning environments (VLEs). This short communication provides a demonstration of the virtual patient application and the deployment of virtual patients on the VLE Moodle.
Godkänd; 2008; 20081201 (ysko)