Development of Internet-based Medical Educational Program

Oh, Seung Keun; Noh, Dong Young; Kim, Young Cheol; Chang, Myung Chul

Abstract

Current medicine is a living science which is developing rapidly. It seems that coming up with the rapid development of medicine by the conventional educational system has some limitation, since the development is too rapid. Development of internet-based medical educational program(IMEP) would be a kind of solution. To overcome the limitation, we developed an IMEP which could be used either on the File Transfer Protocol(FTP) or World Wide Web(WWW), and tested whether it would meet the requirements of our purpose. The IMEP of ours functioned satisfactorily. IMEP for WWW was accessed by far more frequently than IMEP for FTP by the visitors. Frame-typed HTML files were displayed 2 times faster than plain HTML files. HTML files which hid the graphic data behind were displayed more quickly than conventional HTML files. CGI programs were considered to be necessary tools for bidirectional communications between the host and clients on the IMEP. A small PC server worked properly as well as a large server when the access was confined to a small number of visitors. We concluded that IMEP was an excellent adjuvant method of education to make up the gap between the conventional educational system and the rapid development of medicine.