Abstract

e-Learning comes out as a major issue in medical education.

In an effort to build a comprehensive e-learning programme in paediatrics, we decided to produce a set of electronic data dealing with “leukaemia in childhood”, which will ultimately serve as an example and includes: a state of the art in the field (what you have to understand first, what you should do and learn, where you could learn further: clinical presentation, emergencies, classification, treatment, research, ethical, family and psychological aspects); five references; illustrations (cutaneous/bony lesions, imaging, hepatosplenomegaly, marrow smears, biology…); two clinical cases; a series of quizzes.

At each step of the clinical cases and the variety of quizzes, the student, paediatrician or GP will be evaluated; links have been set so that the answers and the explanations can be found in the “state of the art” chapter. In case of unsatisfactory evaluation of the applicant, he will be asked to learn again.

The tremendous amount of available data makes it difficult for students to get a clear idea of what should be known/learned and done. Academics should provide comprehensive data, available on the web; e-learning is not only popular, it will improve the involvement of applicants by interactive processes and by learning to learn.