A new e-learning platform for radiology education (RadEd)

Abstract

One of the key elements of e-learning platforms is the content provided to the students.Content creation is a time demanding task that requires teachers to prepare material tak-ing into account that it will be accessed on-line. Moreover, the teacher is restricted by thefunctionalities provided by the e-learning platforms. In contexts such as radiology whereimages have a key role, the required functionalities are still more specific and difficult tobe provided by these platforms. Our purpose is to create a framework to make teacher’stasks easier, specially when he has to deal with contents where images have a main role. Inthis paper, we present RadEd, a new web-based teaching framework that integrates a smarteditor to create case-based exercises that support image interaction such as changing thewindow width and the grey scale used to render the image, taking measurements on theimage, attaching labels to images and selecting parts of the images, amongst others. It alsoprovides functionalities to prepare courses with different topics, exercises and theory mate-rial, and also functionalities to control students’ work. Different experts have used RadEdand all of them have considered it a very useful and valuable tool to prepare courses whereradiological images are the main component. RadEd provides teachers functionalities toprepare more realistic cases and students the ability to make a more specific diagnosis

This work has been funded in part by grants from the Spanish Government (Nr. TIN2013-47276-C6-1-R) and from the CatalanGovernment (Nr. 2014-SGR-1232)