Maintaining the Characteristics of Effective Clinical Teachers in Computer Assisted Learning Environments

There has been a growing trend in medical education to integrate the use of computers into the undergraduate medical curriculum. While it seems intuitively obvious that personal computers and the Internet can be useful learning tools, it is not clear that the perceived advantages of Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) are warranted. One problem is that computers are too often used in CAI simply as presentation devices for predefined material without ample consideration paid to the pedagogical principles that have informed more conventional teaching practices. The creation of an environment that is conducive to effective learning has often been overlooked in favour of the development and use of increasingly more sophisticated technologies. The current paper represents an attempt to delineate ways in which we might better develop instructional multimedia programs by employing some of the strategies believed to characterise effective clinical teaching. To do so, this paper will briefly review the work of Irby and others in an attempt to draw attention to ways in which the characteristics identified by these researchers might be implemented for the use of CAI.