The Schools of Medicine in Hawaii and New Mexico, in collaboration with rural hospitals or clinics and two of their respective training sites - the Maui Community College Health Center and the Northern Navajo Medical Center - will use high performance computing methods to enhance and deploy existing experiential learning curricula currently used in the medical education programs.
Participating students, faculty tutors and rural preceptors will use virtual reality experiences, three dimensional volumetric image manipulation, and computer-generated simulations transmitted over the Internet Access Grid to improve learning and understanding of a variety of concepts relevant to a clinical case study. These methods will be evaluated interactively across sites and individually and asynchronously.
Experiential learning promotes medical student group involvement in the study of basic concepts and principles as they relate to a variety of clinical problems. Through this process, students begin to understand the relevance of important concepts to actual medical practice and problem solving. In order to enhance the experiential learning, create a greater sense of reality, and better comprehend relevant basic concepts, virtual reality and 3D graphical simulations are being integrated into study cases into which students can be fully immersed in order to achieve defined learning or training goals and objectives.
