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2008 ORION Learning Award Winner
Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) E-Learning Initiatives
The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), the first new medical school in Canada in 35 years, is using advanced networks and digital collaboration tools to create an innovative learning environment that speaks to the next generation of healthcare professionals.
Dr. David Topps, Director of E-Learning, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, says a few words of thanks on behalf of the many e-learning initiatives at the institution.
The school links two main campuses at Lakehead and Laurentian Universities (Thunder Bay and Sudbury), and multiple teaching and research sites distributed across Northern Ontario. One of only two schools developed in North America during the “digital age,” NOSM’s e-curriculum makes extensive use of advanced network and collaboration technologies to bridge the distance between campuses and to facilitate a distributed learning model that is unique in medical education.
In order to achieve an interactive learning environment in which the students of the new millennium excel and thrive, NOSM has broken the mold of traditional distributed learning that relies mostly on lectures and teleconferencing. Instead the school has developed a wide variety of custom applications, distributed resources and multimedia repositories in order to promote online collaboration in small groups and inter-professional initiatives.
These initiatives, developed by the NOSM eLearning Unit, include:
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Virtual Patients: based on Open Labyrinth, a free, open source tool that creates patient simulations using a game-based logic engine that allows multiple cases to be rapidly developed and shared between multiple organizations.
- Health Services Virtual Organisation (HSVO): a project to create a sustainable research platform for experimental development of shared ICT-based medical services across health services organizations across Canada.
- iAnatomy: a collaborative development with Stanford University Medical Media & Information Technologies to interactively share high-resolution 3D anatomy images based on a large library of real anatomical dissections.
- The Northern Ontario Health Information Network (NOHIN) library: a distributed resource with access to over 2,500 full-text medical journals, multimedia resources and learning objects, provides additional online resources such as Online House Calls to support learners and a new open source Web 2.0 library information system.
- Virtual Educational Research Services Environment (VERSE): a project that uses virtual reality, 3D visualization and hapto-visual (“virtual touch”) interfaces to clinical simulations.
- Northern Ontario Simulators in Health Education Network (NOSHN): provides distributed access and use of tools such as virtual patients and simulators to education institutions across 1 million square km of Northern Ontario.
- Pan-Northern Database (PaNDA): a custom-designed, network-enabled database for coordination of educational opportunities and resources across the healthcare education community that was designed through collaboration with partner institutions.
- PocketSnips: brings high-quality educational materials by text and video to learner’s Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), including information on specific procedures.
- Praxis & Red Panda: studies on the use of PDAs as communication, data capture and reference devices in a distributed educational environment, focused on the clinical learning of NOSM’s residency programs but drawing information from across the school.
- NOSM Team Sites: a set of online collaborative tools that support NOSM’s research teams, enabling central sharing of large documents, files and multimedia.
Education informatics resources like those used by NOSM are often too costly for individual organizations and as a result, the school’s research initiatives require ORION, CANARIE and other high-capacity research networks in order to closely partner with educational organizations in Ontario and around the world. All the resources generated by NOSM are also made freely available to other educational institutions to further collaboration.
The eLearning Unit initiatives also support local community education efforts, like the recent collaboration between a 16-year-old Lockerbie Composite High School student and NOSM second year student mentor to create a model of the human brain, which was well-received at the EXTREME Virtual Reality Science Fair held by Sudbury’s Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation (MIRARCO).
Learn more about NOSM at www.normed.ca.
Back to the 2008 Awards Winners page
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