gms | German Medical Science

Blogs, wiki’s and virtual classrooms facilities are more and more common, and they are now available in learning environments like Blackboard. In the past few years Maastricht University has tried out different ways to use these facilities in education, for regular and distance-based students, for bachelor students, interns and post-academic students. Wiki’s are used for group assignments about virtual slides, for instance, and in an international distance-based master to give students the opportunity to introduce themselves. Virtual classroom facilities have been used for online PBL tutoring groups, guest lectures from abroad, thesis supervision groups and contact with interns in other hospitals. An example of the use of blogs is a staff training where teachers use them to reflect on what they are learning about collaborative e-learning tools and discuss how they would like to use them in their own courses. These and other examples will be presented with first –positive and negative- experiences of students and staff. The discussion will focus on how these tools can support Problem-Based Learning.The first results of a –currently running- literature review on this topic will be used to support this discussion [1], [2].