There has been a paradigm shift in the teaching strategies fromdidactic or teacher-centered to more vibrant student centeredapproaches. For the last five decades, small group teaching(SGT) has been a hallmark of this reorientation of educationalstrategies especially in medical schools, which use problem-basedlearning as a core educational tool. The key strength of ...

Web-based learning enables more students to have access to the distance-learning environment, and provides students and teachers with unprecedented flexibility and convenience. However, the early experience of using this new learning means in China exposes a few problems. Among others, teachers accustomed to traditional teaching methods often find it difficult to put their courses online, and s...

We present the methods we applied in the four different tasks of the ImageCLEF 2007 content-based image retrieval evaluation. We participated in all four tasks using a variety of methods. Global and local image descriptors are applied using nearest neighbour search for the medical and photo retrieval tasks and discriminative models for the object retrieval and the medical automatic annotation t...

Whilst knowledge transfer is one of the most widely-claimed benefits of pair programming, little is known about how knowledge transfer is achieved in this setting. This is particularly pertinent for novice−expert constellations, but knowledge transfer takes place to some degree in all constellations. We ask "what does it take to be a good "expert" and how can...

Web based learning enables more students to have access to the distance-learning environment and provides students and teachers with unprecedented flexibility and convenience. However, the early experience of using this new learning means in China exposes a few problems. Among others, teachers accustomed to traditional teaching methods often find it difficult to put their courses online and som...

INTRODUCTION In the complex setting of a medical school it becomes essential to utilize an approach to teaching and learning that is best suited to the needs of the students. In developing countries like India, where there is an exponential increase of institutions catering to medical students, it becomes a challenge to teach to large number of students per class. Hence, research is needed to i...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was designed to investigate medical students' perceptions of small group teaching effectiveness in a hybrid curriculum. MATERIALS AND METHODS A cross-sectional, descriptive survey was conducted at the School of Medicine, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine where we collected the data from 195 undergraduate students. A self-administered quest...

Benefits derived from the Council for Health Services Accreditation South Africa (COHSASA) accreditation of the Universitas Academic Hospital (UAH) in Bloemfontein are illustrated. Accreditation assessments were performed between 2001 and 2007, and full compliance with the COHSASA standards for Academic Hospitals was achieved. An initiative to develop thoracic surgery in central South Africa (S...

Using 3D Virtual Worlds for commercial activities on the Web and the development of human-like sales assistants operating in such environments are ongoing trends of E-Commerce. The majority of the existing approaches oriented towards the development of such assistants are agent-based and are focused on explicit programming of the agents’ decision making apparatus. While effective in some very s...

BACKGROUND Informed and shared decision-making require competences for both partners - healthcare professionals and patients. There is a lack of training courses in evidence-based medicine for patients and counsellors. OBJECTIVE We investigated feasibility, acceptability and the potential effects of a 2 x 2.5 days training course on critical health competences in patients, patient counsellors...