Empowering radiologic education on the Internet: A new virtual website technology for hosting interactive educational content on the world wide web

Objective: We describe a virtual web site hosting technology that enables e ducators in radiology to emblazon and make available for delivery on the wo rld wide web their own interactive educational content, free from dependenc ies on in-house resources and policies. Materials/Methods: This suite of te chnologies includes a graphically oriented software application, designed f or the computer novice, to facilitate the input, storage, and management of domain expertise within a database system. The database stores this expert ise as choreographed and interlinked multimedia entities including text, im agery, interactive questions, and audio. Case-based presentations or themat ic lectures can be authored locally, previewed locally within a web browser , then uploaded at will as packaged knowledge objects to an educator's (or department's) personal web site housed within a virtual server architecture . This architecture can host an unlimited number of unique educational web sites for individuals or departments in need of such service. Each virtual site's content is stored within that site's protected back-end database con nected to Internet Information Server (Microsoft Corp, Redmond WA) using a suite of Active Server Page (ASP) modules that incorporate Microsoft's Acti ve Data Objects (ADO) technology. Each person's or department's electronic teaching material appears as an independent web site with different levels of access- controlled by a username-password strategy-for teachers and stud ents. There is essentially no static hypertext markup language (HTML). Rath er, all pages displayed for a given site are rendered dynamically from case -based or thematic content that is fetched from that virtual site's databas e. The dynamically rendered HTML is displayed within a web browser in a Soc ratic fashion that can assess the recipient's current fund of knowledge whi le providing instantaneous user-specific feedback. Each site is emblazoned with the logo and identification of the participating institution. Individu als with teacher-level access can use a web browser to upload new content a s well as manage content already stored on their virtual site. Each virtual site stores, collates, and scores participants' responses to the interacti ve questions posed on line. Conclusion: This virtual web site strategy empo wers the educator with an end-to-end solution for creating interactive educ ational content and hosting that content within the educator's personalized and protected educational site on the world wide web, thus providing a val uable outlet that can magnify the impact of his or her talents and contribu tions. Copyright (C) 2001 by W.B. Saunders Company.