Telematics in undergraduate teaching

The use of telematics in the practice of medicine has received much recent attention but little has been written about the use of these techniques in medical education. This is a report of a pilot study in which an interactive video-conference took place between medical students at the UAE University and their opposite numbers at Aberdeen University. In Aberdeen, the Dean of the Medical Faculty simultaneously taught Aberdeen and UAE students on a clinical case. He was able to confine his activities largely to the correction of misconceptions, the emphasis of important points and the addition of missing information, while the students themselves conducted most of the presentation. The UAE students presented their Community Health projects and had a spirited discussion on them with the Aberdeen students. Recent technological advances have so improved the quality of transmission of both visual and auditory images and at reasonable cost, using the ISDN telephone system, that the feasibility of using this medium as an aid to teaching has suddenly materialized. The experiment showed that the technology was adequate for easy, fully interactive teaching among students from different continents and with different cultural backgrounds. It is particularly suitable for the Arab world where it is the custom to teach males and females separately. The pilot study has pointed out the existence of a medium of communication and teaching which, if proved to be effective, could have far-reaching consequences in the undergraduate and postgraduate teaching of medicine.