title: Managing and supporting medical education with a virtual learning environment: the Edinburgh Electronic Medical Curriculum.
abstract: Virtual learning environments (VLEs) can be a compelling and powerful way to support and manage contemporary medical education. A VLE purposively aligned to a course can integrate and normalize procedures and provide a central access point and reference mechanism for all of a course's component communities. The Edinburgh Electronic Medical Curriculum (EEMeC), developed in-house to support the Edinburgh under-graduate course, has proved to be a great success with students, teaching and administrative staff. It exists in a 'blended' relationship with the course, which uses both face-to-face and online delivery modes. This paper maps out the process of the EEMeC system's development and describes a number of factors that have contributed to its success.
authors.affiliation: College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, The University of Edinburgh, UK. rachel.ellaway@ed.ac.uk
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ellaway
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dewhurst
authors.forename: Allan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cumming
mesh_terms: D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction; D003479:Curriculum; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D015397:Program Evaluation; D012606:Scotland; D014584:User-Computer Interface