A Multimedia Integrated Learning Framework for Medical Education

In recent years, information and communication technology and multimedia technology have increasingly altered the landscape of the educational field particularly in higher education. In that, student is becoming the key focus of the educational process, where students’ creativity and interactions are strongly encouraged through IT enabled systems. The learning management system (LMS) is the system responsible for integrating all learning services and managing teaching and learning activities. It provides a collection of tools and functions to support teaching and learning processes, usually including course management tools, online group discussion, homework collections and grading; and course evaluation. The amount of multimedia support facilitated by the e-learning systems has given significant consideration in order to make distance education as effective as classroom education and make the blended leaning experience more effective. While the technology is moving toward a multimedia rich learning management system, its practical deployments is still far away, due to many unsolved technical and pedagogical problems. In this paper we present a framework for implementing a content integrated learning management system with specific focus on multimedia enrichment in learning content. It can be used effectively for teaching courses in medicine as well as to support complementary education for clinicians through channels such as telemedicine which can be integrated as an important component of epidemiology. We discuss two implementation examples: (a) UMELMS implementation in Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and (b) telemedicine implementation to support international medical collaboration to present our concept of new generation medical education system design.