A first evaluation of a pedagogical network for medical students at the University Hospital of Rennes

A pedagogical network has been developed at University Hospital of Rennes from 1996. The challenge is to give medical information and informatics tools to all medical students in the clinical wards of the University Hospital. At first, nine wards were connected to the medical school server which is linked to the Internet. Client software electronic mail and WWW Netscape on Macintosh computers. Sever software is set up on Unix SUN providing a local homepage with selected pedagogical resources. These documents are stored in a DBMS database ORACLE and queries can be provided by specialty, authors or disease. The students can access a set of interactive teaching programs or electronic textbooks and can explore the Internet through the library information system and search engines. The teachers can send URL and indexation of pedagogical documents and can produce clinical cases: the database updating will be done by the users. This experience of using Web tools generated enthusiasm when we first introduced it to students. The evaluation shows that if the students can use this training early on, they will adapt the resources of the Internet to their own needs.