mEducator: A Best Practice Network for Repurposing and Sharing

Abstract. Although there is an abundance of medical educational content avail-able in individual EU academic institutions, this is not widely available or easy to discover and retrieve, due to lack of standardized content sharing mecha-nisms. The mEducator EU project will face this lack by implementing and ex-perimenting between two different sharing mechanisms, namely, one based one mashup technologies, and one based on semantic web services. In addition, the mEducator best practice network will critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialized state-of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared, repurposed and re-used across European higher academic institutions. Educa-tional content included in mEducator covers and represents the whole range of medical educational content, from traditional instructional teaching to active learning and experiential teaching/studying approaches. It spans the whole range of types, from text to exam sheets, algorithms, teaching files, computer programs (simulators or games) and interactive objects (like virtual patients and electronically traced anatomies), while it covers a variety of topics. In this paper, apart from introducing the relevant project concepts and strategies, em-phasis is also placed on the notion of (dynamic) user-generated content, its ad-vantages and peculiarities, as well as, gaps in current research and technology practice upon its embedding into existing standards