Pitt Med Navigator ñ A web-based curriculum development and management system

James B. McGee and Jane Alexander, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

ABSTRACT:

The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's Laboratory for Educational Technology (the Lab) has designed, developed and implemented a flexible online content development and curriculum management system to support all levels of medical education. An early version of this application, the Pitt Med Navigator, was introduced at the 2002 Slice of Life workshop; this demonstration will be of the final version and our experience during its first year of use.

Pitt Med Navigator is a proprietary web-based application (Active Server Pages and SQL Server 2000) consisting of four highly integrated content development tools: 1) Course Management, 2) Case Authoring, 3) Multimedia Collection Authoring, and 4) Self-Assessment Quizzes. The application allows course directors and faculty to establish, create and manage their own online course materials without the need for technical support or training. They create their own web pages within a structured navigation system and upload content such as text documents, images, movies and digital slides. Interactive cases, collections of multimedia and quizzes are created and added to the courses using similar web-based forms.

To date, four second-year medical school courses have demonstrated Navigator's technical success and a high degree of student/faculty acceptance. The faculty have produced 4 gigabytes of content consisting of over 4000 web pages 2500 uploaded documents and files. A class of 150 students made as many as 620 unique visits to the site at peak, averaging 38 minutes in length. They viewed nearly half-a-million pages and over 250,000 documents during a single one-month course.

This demonstration will focus on the design and technical decisions that made Navigator successful and the challenges encountered during development and deployment at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION:

Participants will benefit by learning about the technical and design issues related to designing, developing and deploying Pitt Med Navigator, a broad-based content development and curriculum management system at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. They will have the opportunity to view and interact with the Navigator web application, including its content authoring system. They will also learn about how students and faculty use this proprietary education tool.

James B. McGee, MD 205B Mezzanine Level, Scaife Hall 3550 Terrace Street Pittsburgh, PA 15261 Phone: 412-648-9679 Fax: 412-648-9378 Email: mailto:jbmcgee@medschool.pitt.edu http://labedutech.medschool.pitt.edu

CO-AUTHORS: Jane Alexander 205C Mezzanine Level, Scaife Hall 3550 Terrace Street Pittsburgh, PA 15261 Phone: 412-648-9679 Fax: 412-648-9378 Email: mailto:jalexander@medschool.pitt.edu