What Do Residents Really Want? Building an Anesthesia E-learning Portal from the Ground Up: The Stanford Ether Project

The Stanford ETHER project is an anesthesia e-learning portal website for faculty, residents, medical students and staff of the Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Anesthesia. The website provides a wide variety of medical information created or curated by our medical faculty including “Top Ten” lists of recent articles from the scientific literature, course syllabi, clinical algorithms, and access to medical databases through the Stanford LANE portal. In addition to static content, the ETHER project has incorporated “Web 2.0” technologies wherever practical to facilitate active engagement of our users and to promote an end-user content model whereby our own end-users create educational content for the website. Some interactive Web 2.0 features we have implemented include embedded RSS feeds from major anesthesia journals as well as a Blog written by our faculty members addressing educational issues in anesthesia. We have utilized the blog format to create interactive quizzes and contests which residents receive each month and compete for recognition and prizes. We have also created a web-based database collection of educational content (MAJIC) that allows Stanford faculty and residents to upload their own articles and content using a web browser (e.g. PDF files, powerpoint lectures, etc.) to be shared with others. These entries can be actively searched by end-users or accessed by an RSS feed that is automatically updated when new content is added to the database. We also created a series of podcast video lectures available in RSS feeds and the Apple iTunes store. To enhance use of ETHER at the point of care, we have also recently created ETHER LITE, a version of the website that is compatible with mobile computing platforms, specifically the Apple iPhone. Our objectives in the Stanford ETHER project are to assess benefits and limitations of different Web 2.0 services in providing online educational content to our users. We found several benefits of Web 2.0 services include the ability to dynamically integrate content into our portal without the use of specialized content management software (CMS), ability to keep our users aware of the most current content available on ETHER, and to engage our users to create their own content for the website. Some disadvantages we have encountered include occasional platform incompatibilities with various third-party Web 2.0 services we are using, and occasional problems retrieving content using these technologies. We have taken a faculty-moderated approach to content contribution to ETHER to insure the quality and validity of contributions created by our end-users. Web server logs show the mean visit duration for ETHER since its launch on 7/1/2008 is about 7 minutes with page visits as follows: homepage (55%), paging services (24%), CA-1 tutorial (2.2%), social activity photos (2.06%), telephone directory (1.66%), and resident call schedule (1.37%) Interestingly, content domains of Ether that were the most labor-intensive to produce, including podcasts, and MAJIC, accounted for less than 1% of total web site traffic. Future research will explore possible reasons for this observation as well as strategies to optimize use of Web 2.0 technologies on Ether. []