mEducator aims to

• identify and collect a critical mass of different types of health educational material such as:

- conventional educational content types: lecture notes, books, lecture presentations, exam questions, practices, scientific papers, graphs, images/videos, algorithms and simulators
- educational content types unique in medical education: teaching files, virtual patients, evidence based medicine forms, objective standard clinical examinations, clinical guidelines, anatomical atlases, electronic traces of images, etc
- alternative educational content types: active learning techniques and problem/case based learning sessions via web 2.0 technologies, serious games (2D/3D), web traces, wikis, blogs/discussion forums, etc.

• examine to what extend existing standards like Healthcare LOM can address all types of health educational material listed above, and make respective recommendations for standards extensions.
• examine to what extend existing standards like SCORM for Healthcare are adequate to support the packaging and seamless delivery of all these types of educational material.
• examine possible extensions of existing ontological schemata, which describe the semantics of LOs (e.g. s-LOM ontology).
• communicate and interact with standardization bodies like MedBiquitous Europe, IEEE, IMS, CEN, Health On the Net, HL7, etc to ensure adoption of recommendations/extensions into standards.

In order to derive best practices for medical educational content re-use and sharing, the mEducator BPN needs a critical mass of medical educational content types (rather than items), representing various educational approaches (e.g. conventional teaching, active learning, e-learning and blended learning, etc), various audiences, various languages and various cultures.

Expected results

Key transferable outcomes of the mEducator BPN include: 

• A metadata scheme for description of all types of medical educational content, with reference to relevant standards (i.e. Healthcare LOM).
• Recommendations on how to apply and/or extend the medical educational standard Healthcare LOM to address variable types of medical content, content re-purposing, and content sharing and exchange
• Recommendations on best practices in implementing and using standardized commonplace technology and respective reference models for content medical educational content use, re-use and sharing.
• Medical educational content of a vast variety of types, formally described, re-purposed and delivered along existing standards in loosely coupled isolated LCMSs and in federated LCMSs of the partners.
• A simple IPR scheme for educational content provided and re-purposed in academic networks.