I had other business to attend and so did not make any of the morning sessions. This session runs from 11:30am to 12:30pm. Of the 4 listed presentation only 3 will be offered so the time constraint is not so bad for these folks. The session is titled “eLearning” and is the first of 2 sessions. The second one will be held at 4pm in this same room later today. I hope to be in attendance for this one as well.

The first presentation is from the Ukraine titled “Multimedia teaching systems as educational tool in everyday work of pharmaceutical companies: 5 years of practical experience”. This is a vendor product show & tell aka “sales pitch”. It is an interactive and multimedia with knowledge ‘control’ & evaluation (final testing). Created from Adobe Director; 4 modules including Teaching, Control (tests/evaluation via different test types), and others. Offers a CD demo for viewing.

The second one is “A strategy for health professionals learning at distance: Focus on Brazilian Sentinels Hospital”. Presenter is same young woman as yesterday (R. S. Gundim). One objective is to ’spread’ evidence-based practice. This in effect is an evidence-based health course. Used multi-point VC via ISDN / IP changed to streaming video via Net due to connection quality issues with ISDN/IP format. Interesting findings; most folks liked the course. 94% graduated course (94/118 enrollees). 2nd course included more folks - over 23 states with 1762 participants / students still uses video-streaming format. Increase in team size due to substantial increase in numbers of participants. Scheduled to conclude in Jun2 of ‘08. Of the conclusions there are few initiatives like this public / private as this one is. Of more uniqueness is the high number of cities concurrently active. There is consideration for a 3rd course next year.

The last presentation is title “Virtual health care knowledge center in Georgia”. Presenter provided a thorough background of the eHealth efforts prior to main discussion. This center is about implementation, evaluation and adoption of telemedicine services for Georgia. Center of telemedicine / teleconsultation center is in Tbilis, the capital city, with its own server. They also use Moodle as the cms application for e-learning. Advantages include flexiblility as well as open source. This project is now working on developing an actual application based on the .NET platform with a SQL db as the “back-ends”. Screen shots of applications provided for viewing to help understand this application development.

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