Virtual Classroom Rationale Rationale for the Virtual Classroom Approach Our project will demonstrate how the World-Wide Web can be used to deliver teaching materials that reinforce, enrich, and supplement current learning modules. In part we are making a virtue of necessity here, because the Web helps us reach medical students and faculty who are often off-campus doing special preceptorships in rural communities, or who have clinical activities that interfere with their ability to assemble in real classrooms.
Participants can engage the material from pretty much anywhere, anytime.
The modular nature of the Web, and hypermedia in general, will make it easier to present material from multiple, alternative points of view or levels of abstraction. Each Web page, using the HTML language, can be linked to other pages in a manner similar to early authorware programs such as hypercard and supercard. Students can be prompted to ask questions or to go to different pages for answers to questions that are raised by the initial material, such as describing a clinical case. Questions can be directed to the attention of the course instructor, who can respond with specific answers or directions to material on other pages. The students can have access to original journal articles, through on-line search tools, during the time that they are studying a problem.