Fully automated virtual lessons in medical education

The Medical University of Graz fosters a blended learning concept in medical education where classroom and virtual lessons alternate according to a well-planned didactic concept. Hence from the very beginning eLearning was introduced also virtual lessons were a part of the curriculum. In the first years the handling of the virtual lessons was purely manual resulting in a huge amount of administrative efforts for the teachers and the staff. Since 2008 we consecutively introduced software and interfaces between the learning management system and our central administration system in order to automatize virtual lessons as much as possible and significantly reduce the administrative efforts from the teachers. With the introduction of version 2 of this interface called MOMOS we have now also a good usability for the administration staff. In this paper we describe how we applied our infrastructure managing virtual lessons in medical education to our modular based curriculum. Furthermore we give some evaluation results from students on the usage of one specific virtual lesson implemented as an eLecture. Last but not least we give practical experiences and conclusions from the evaluation results applicable in general to higher education and not restricted to medical education.