Curriculum for building medical resources on the Internet--experience in Taiwan

This paper describes our experience with a one-semester course on how to build a medically-related homepage on the Internet, designed for fourth-year medical students. Based on the assumption of limited technical knowledge of the Internet, this class taught students Internet-exploring skills, multimedia authoring and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) in the first eight-week period. Students were then divided into four-person teams and asked to select a topic for a homepage. These teams were then asked to collect the necessary resources for the development of the homepage both through individual work and, consultation with an advisor. Each group project for building medically-related homepage was accomplished and presented in the remaining four-week period. The resultant projects of these fourth-year medical students were of surprisingly good content and high quality. Medical students rapidly learned to use the software tools, and through proper instruction and provision of equipment, they were able to build significant medical resources on the Internet that can potentially be useful in education, clinical applications and research.