The French Virtual Medical University

This paper is the description of a French Virtual Medical University based on the federation of existing or currently being developed resources in several Medical Schools in France. The objectives of the project is not only to share experiences across the country but also to integrate several resources using the New Information and Communication Technologies to support new pedagogical approaches for medical students and also for continuing medical education. The project includes: A virtual Medical Campus using secure access from several sites, The Integration of new interactive resources based on pedagogical methods, Implementation of new indexing and search engines based on medical vocabularies and ontologies, The definition of general and specific portals, the evaluation of the system for ergonomics and contents.