The development of minimum competencies in geriatrics for medical students presents an enormous challenge to medical educators. Today’s clinician-educators are being stretched thin with increasing teaching demands while also facing increasing institutional demands to be more clinically productive. Thus, traditional instructor-centered teaching is yielding to a learner-centered model that puts learners in control of their own education. E-learning is increasingly being used by medical educators today to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of educational interventions in the face of these pedagogical challenges.

Drs. Heather Anderson and Mary McDonald from the University of Kansas Medical Center have developed an interactive web module that focuses on easing up an instructor-driven curriculum by shifting to one that is web-based and learner-driven. Faced with only 2 weeks of neurology clerkship, KU employed the use of a web module as a vehicle to deliver geriatric neurology education to their 3rd year medical students. The module covers 10 geriatric neurology topics: Parkinson's disease, stroke, dementia, delirium, peripheral neuropathy, neck/back pain, sleep disorders, temporal arteritis, cranial nerve disorders, and localization of a lesion.

The web module design will be familiar to anyone who has spent time browsing the internet. Information is displayed on a single page, and students are encouraged to click links to view pop-up windows with diagrams and photographs relevant to the topic. To solidify learners’ comprehension of the material, the outlined content of each topic is followed by sample cases with interactive multiple-choice or open-ended questions. Once learners have decided on the answer, they can follow a link to a brief explanation of the correct answer. Accompanying videos and images help to enhance the learning process.

Highlights of the module include a video of a man with Parkinson’s Disease walking across the room demonstrating abnormal gait, several images throughout the module including a comparison of an MRI and CT scan of a brain prior to a stroke, as well as the aforementioned interactive quizzes to ascertain the learner’s grasp of the information.

One of the limitations of the module appears to be its linear nature. Students have to learn from "top to bottom" and can only jump to the beginning of one of the ten topics. The font size chosen for the web page is quite small, but can be enlarged by the more savvy computer user by holding Ctrl and either scrolling the mouse wheel or pressing + or -. An accompanying resources list would also be beneficial to direct the student for more in-depth discussion of the topic. Although the self-assessment questions are helpful, there are no directions noting that some require more than one answer; this may not  be intuitive to the learner.

Overall, this educational product appears to be a very appropriate method for delivery of geriatric content to achieve outcome-based competencies in geriatrics – a rational compromise between geriatric educators, who are handicapped by their inadequate number and burdened by increased teaching demands, and today’s medical students, who function with a world of communication and information at their fingertips. KU's small study of the module's usage shows it to be as effective as didactic lectures to improve one's geriatric neurology knowledge on the 10 topics as assessed by multiple choice questions. This is the only web based module to address geriatric neurology to date, and it can be accessed right now - for free - at POGOe.org!