No abstract

The World Wide Web creates new challenges and opportunities for medical educators. Prominent among these are the lack of consistent standards by which to evaluate web-based educational tools. We present the instrument that was used to review web-based innovations in medical education submissions to the 2003 Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) national meeting, and discuss the process used by the SGIM web-based clinical curriculum interest group to develop the instrument. The 5 highest-ranked submissions are summarized with commentary from the reviewers. has ever lived. 1 The web is attractive to medical educators because it allows rapid updates of information; inclusion of multimedia; distribution of information over large geographic areas at little expense; and-for better and worsedissemination of ideas unencumbered by traditional mechanisms of publication and peer review. Ambiguity about the evaluation of web-based educational curricula has stifled discourse in the field. Currently available criteria for critique of health information sites focus on sites directed at the general public. These criteria, although analogous to ours as regards content, generally lack the specific attention to evaluation, feedback, and learner-oriented material that is especially important in medical education. KEY WORDS:2,3 The absence of an accepted tool for qualitative assessment of web sites specific to medical education makes it difficult to share and be recognized for high-quality work. However, this has not arrested investment in web sites. The Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine list 27 institutions with sites dedicated to the internal medicine clerkship 4 -and that list is incomplete. Twenty-four percent (33/135) of the Innovations in Medical Education (IME) abstracts at the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) 2003 meeting were related to web-based curriculum.5 Because web sites are not "published" and no royalties are returned, many medical schools use passwordprotected private sites, which limit collaboration and resource sharing. If evaluation and dissemination of highquality web sites are improved, resources can be directed more efficiently. The web creates new challenges for evaluation. An excellent teaching web site should provide informationthe "content" of the site-of quality comparable to traditional print materials (such as journal articles, textbooks, and syllabi). However, the web offers more options for presentation than print media. These include the ability to "link" from one page to another by clicking on relevant text, the inclusion of animations and sounds, and the capacity for interactive pages that modify content based on user responses. These innovations in presentation put an additional burden on evaluators, who must consider both content and format when critiquing web sites.The Society of General Internal Medicine's (SGIM) webbased clinical curriculum interest group, founded in 1999 by 3 of the authors (HAS, BLH, DED), was established to foster collaboration among internal m...

The interclerkship format is a viable approach for incorporating orphan topics into the clinical curriculum.

No abstract