An Internet Based Learning Tool in Orthopaedic Surgery: Preliminary Experiences and Results

Today universities can offer a variety of educational resources to their students through the internet. These may include lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations, or even an entire recording of a lecture in video format. At the Hannover Medical School (Hannover, Germany), the Trauma Surgery Department in collaboration with the Institute of Medical Informatics has developed an alternative method of "E-learning". We created a web-based multimedia resource center for Trauma Surgery using the Content-Management-System (CMS) Schoolbook application, which was initially developed by the Institute of Medical Informatics. The so called "Trauma Surgery Schoolbook" was first adopted in October of 2005 and has since been used and evaluated by medical students at our institution. The evaluation results for the academic year 2005/06 are reported in this paper. The majority of students enrolled in the Trauma Surgery rotation utilized the Schoolbook, which they regarded as a helpful and effective study tool. Our students embraced the possibility of being able to prepare for lectures and use the Schoolbook for independent home studying purposes. Over time, there was a steady increase in the utilization of the Schoolbook by the students from 67% in the first trimester to 93% in the third trimester. The majority of the surveyed students (79.6%) found the Schoolbook to be constructive and helpful. 8.1% did not have any opinion, and only 12.3% found it to not be helpful. The instructors also found this web-based training program to be both constructive and practical, and were able to utilize its multimedia components to complement their lectures. Overall, our experience with this computer-aided learning program demonstrated that web-based technologies can improve the quality of medical education, benefiting both the students and the instructors.