The Use Of Lotus Notes QuickPlace As A Web Development Tool: Reducing The Medical Educator's Reliance On IT Staff And Enhancing Faculty Autonomy

*St. George's University Medical School, *Department of Anatomical Sciences, GRENADA, West Indies & #St. George's University, Department of Information Technology, Bay Shore NY, USA

ABSTRACT:

As multimedia and the web play an increasing role in medical education, some of the toughest problems is website management and the distribution of the work required to both produce content and maintain the sites. There is a gap between medical educators who often do not possess the computer savvy to operate and maintain servers and the IT personnel who often do not possess the knowledge base of the subject to produce the content. At St. George's University Medical School we have bridged some of this gap by utilizing preexisting tools developed for the business community and adapted them for academic purposes. The Department of Anatomical Sciences is using a program called QuickPlace© which was developed by Lotus Notes© in order to allow members of a business team to communicate and collaborate on projects from distant sites.

QuickPlace provides a secure environment where individual team members, whether members of the same academic institution or outside it,can be granted authorization to enter the site as readers, authors or managers. When members enter the QuickPlace site, it is tailored to show them only what they have been cleared to view, edit or add depending on their security authorization. It can be organized into a series of rooms and nested rooms, each with their own security control. From an educators perspective there are several key benefits to using QuickPlace for website development:

•Faculty can add content directly to QuickPlace sites using only an Internet browser, bypassing the need to give faculty server training and eliminating the time it takes for faculty to go through an often over burdened webmaster.

•Ease of adding any of the numerous page formats supported by QuickPlace. Managers and editors can import simple Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files as webpages, including jpeg, gif and animated gif graphics, and more complex HTML, Flash or Java script pages. In gif graphics is the option to simply attach documents of any kind for downloading and viewing on the users' computer. Each of the supported formats can be added to the site as webpages by following a series of intuitive options election windows.

•Ease of getting started and the ease of expansion. As the content of the site expands, more "Rooms" and "Inner Rooms" can be developed to accommodate the growth. Using the security features of QuickPlace rooms, developing portions of the site can be made available only to editors and managers, but kept invisible to readers until the content is ready for release.

•Faculty and others can be quickly enrolled into a QuickPlace website by managers, with usernames and passwords, even if they are not members of the same institution or are geographically distributed. Therefore, guest faculty can be invited to post material or review content with an email that is generated automatically by the QuickPlace when the member is enrolled. Changes in content can also be rapidly communicated by QuickPlace email to all users.

This presentation will use the St. George's University School of Medicine Department of Anatomical Sciences QuickPlace Site as a showcase for the simplicity of QuickPlace. We will demonstrate its use as an effective tool for any department interested in delivering easily manageable and expandable web sites for the purpose of medical education and departmental team projects.

This QuickPlace presentation would be of great assistance to educators that are looking for a program that allows them to begin controlling their own web content and layout without the necessity of going through a network administrator. It is also of use to webmasters that are looking to disseminate the workload associated with web site content production and management. Finally, this talk will be of interest for administrators looking for a product to begin their web site production that is both easy to administrate and easy to teach to faculty. Since the only software requirement is a browser and a web connection QuickPlace circumvents both the need to teach server maintenance and management to faculty and the need to standardize the software on computers used by faculty.

Craig W. Goodmurphy
Department of Anatomical Sciences
True Blue Campus
St. George's University
1 East Main St., Bay Shore NY
USA 11706
Phone: 473 444-4585 ext 2008
Fax: 473 444-2887
Email: cgoodmurphy@sgu.edu
Website: password protected at this point

CO-AUTHORS:

Don Wheeler M.D.
Anthony Schmidt J.D.
Robert Jordan Ph.D.
Peter Abrahams M.D.
same as main author
Email: dwheeler@sgu.edu
aschmidt@sgu.edu
Robert Jordan@sgu.edu
pha1000@cus.cam.ac.uk (Peter Abrahams)
Website: www.sgu.edu