A standards-based approach for facilitating discovery of learning objects at the point of care

Recent concerns about the quality and safety of healthcare practice provide an imperative for discovering and accessing learning resources. The growing ubiquity of the Internet, World Wide Web, and on-line educational content provide opportunity for healthcare practitioners to identify and master learning in a granular and rapid fashion. The e-learning community at large has developed a number of standards to facilitate interoperability of learner competencies, metadata describing on-line content, and packaging and navigation of such content. The overall goal of our project is to enable healthcare professionals to easily and rapidly discover learning content at the point of care. This discovery and access of learning content will be based on healthcare-specific extensions of existing e-learning standards, which are themselves based on other Web standards, such as Web Services.