The evolution of Nutrition in Medicine, a computer-assisted nutrition curriculum

The primary mission of the Nutrition in Medicine (NIM) project is to provide tools to facilitate the nutrition training of undergraduate medical students. NIM has developed and distributed a CD-ROM-based nutrition curriculum to medical schools since 1995. However, the medical school environment is changing rapidly; there is pressure to do more in less time, and many schools are emphasizing independent and integrated learning. The need for a nutrition curriculum that is more flexible and more accessible has driven the evolution of the NIM curriculum from CD-ROM-based delivery into a more modular curriculum with Web delivery. Such changes facilitate access and eliminate the need for installation of CD-ROMs and the associated technical support issues. In addition, the instructional units are smaller and more modular. Eventually, the authoring system will allow instructors to put together a course to meet their specific instructional needs. Our future plans also include custom-tailoring that will allow students to opt out of learning material on the basis of pretest scores if they are already proficient in the content. In this update, we provide a detailed description of the new system and the rationale for the modifications we made. Furthermore, we describe how each change addresses barriers to nutrition education as identified from our surveys and others and from direct user feedback. These innovative strategies should allow a better fit of NIM within diverse medical school environments and help to promote incorporation of the curriculum into more medical schools.