Project Overview Medical schools in Canada are currently facing a "feast and famine" situation when it comes to developing and sharing non-commercial online educational multimedia. FEAST Due to the ever-decreasing cost and complexity of the required equipment, there have never been so many people working on the development of high quality multimedia materials, and entire conferences (such as Slice of Life) have even been dedicated to the subject. The success of the open-source software movement, and the activities of groups like the ACMC's Medical Informatics working group, have given many people a vision of a possible future landscape in which sharing becomes the norm, overcoming geographic, political, and other barriers. A wide variety of sophisticated online broadband enabled media libraries have sprung up over the past five years, all promising us easy access to huge libraries of medical education materials that we can use in our own educational programs. Some medical schools have obtained major funding for large development projects, and have offered to collaborate with others. FAMINE Most of the material being developed is being done in one-time, limited-funding projects within a single medical school, often using complex formats unique to that application, and usually with no time to think about coordinating or sharing the development with other medical schools. | |
|