Building a Virtual University for Orthopaedics

The development of a Virtual Orthopaedic University is underpinned by a pedagogical approach built on current education research in terms of learning being situated and authentic; with learners adopting an active and constructive approach. An aim of the project is to maximise the relationship between different pedagogical approaches, tools and resources in a novel learning environment, while providing support for the decision making using a toolkit approach. The Virtual Orthopaedic University architecture can be used in a variety of different ways to support different types and levels of users and different syllabi. This paper describes the rationale behind the development of the system, the overall architecture, and the relationship between the architecture and the adopted pedagogical strategy.