Enabling the delivery of university courses in medicine

The Mayflower Project employed satellite telecommunications techniques such as multicasting IP, IP/DVB and Internet return channel to enable the delivery of university courses in medicine. Two groups of participants employed the system. One group was based in Italy and was led by the University of Perugia, which focused on nursing. The other group was based in Norway and led by the University of Tromso, which focused on nursing and medicine. Students attended Perugia University courses either from home or the University classrooms. Additionally a group of professional nurses in Naples used the system for a course on "clinical pathways". The system used in this project can be easily used in other educational fields, in particular Continuing Medical Education (CME). Mayflower was designed to build a service centre based tele-education model. From a business point of view this model foresees an operator, not necessarily the same as the telecommunications provider, that operates the application servers and makes the facility available to the users. At the end of the course the students were provided with a proper grounding in the basic subjects of the five modules for Nurses. The scope was to get the best understanding of the most important elements of the physiological and pathological processes from a nurse perspective, and to understand the therapeutic and rehabilitative intervention. During the whole course, the students were involved in theoretical (Mayflower e-learning) and practical training activities in Perugia, under a tutors direction in both cases. This was done during the e-learning part of the project, employing interactive software and personal contact in Perugia. These issues are associated with the EU's general objective of equal opportunities for all citizens, to which any such research and development effort contributes. This facilitated sharing concept may also induce direct economic benefits through a more efficient exploitation (e.g. continuous, shared use) of existing educational infrastructures and resources.