Use of commercial 'authoring systems' for medical education

A recent development in computer-assisted medical instruction has been the introduction of 'authoring systems'. Authoring systems are computer programs which can allow an instructor to prepare computer-based medical instructional materials without the need to know programming languages or have more than minimal familiarity with the computer hardware. This report documents the use of a commercially available authoring system that was used to prepare a tutorial for medical student instruction. This lesson presented information about paediatric developmental disabilities in both a text and question-and-answer format. Significant improvement in knowledge was demonstrated by the pre- and post-test results of the study group compared to the control group. The control group consisted of students who did not view the tutorial but had been assigned to a paediatric developmental disabilities clinic. The medical students who viewed the tutorial generally had very favourable comments about the use of such a system for the presentation of new information.