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 Ren nes from 1996. The challenge is to give medical information and inform atics tools to all medical students in the clinical wards of the Unive rsity Hospital. At first, nine wards were connected to the medical sch ool server which is linked to the Internet. Client software electronic mail and WWW Netscape on Macintosh computers. Sen er software is set up on Unix SUN providing a local homepage with selected pedagogical re sources. These documents are stored in a DBMS database ORACLE and quer ies 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 a nd search engines. The teachers can send URL and indexation of pedagog ical documents and can produce clinical cases: the database updating w ill be done by the users. This experience of using Web tools generated enthusiasm when we first introduced it to students. The evaluation sh ows that if the students can use this training early on, they will ada pt the resources of the Internet to their own needs.