The Interactive Media Laboratory at Dartmouth Medical School has developed more than twenty large-scale interactive multimedia programs in the areas of health professional education, emergency responder training, and patient education. The professional education programs were mainly developed for continuing education use. However, three of the programs, dealing with HIV primary care, clinical genetics, and smoking cessation in pregnancy, have been used by several medical schools. In addition, the programs constitute a large set of resources in instructional and media design, multiple media (video, audio, graphics, animations), and computer software, as well as methods and techniques for program development.

Despite their generally high quality and comprehensiveness, the programs have not yet been widely adopted for undergraduate medical education. Partly this is due to a lack of “marketing” on our part; it’s likely that most medical and medical science educators aren’t aware of the programs. There are also curricular and other barriers that are faced by most e-learning programs, including finding room in already-crowded student schedules, integration with existing course content, and an understandable reluctance to use programs that were developed elsewhere.

The first part of this focus session will demonstrate three of our programs in some depth, in order to familiarize attendees with them and their general level of design and content quality: HIV primary care, clinical genetics, and a new program on sexual assault. In the process we will also show the various resources available in these programs. The second part of the session will consist of discussion among attendees of how the programs and their resources might be made more generally useful for medical and medical science education.