Program Information
The Educational Concept and Global Impact of EMITEL E-Encyclopaedia of Medical Physics
S Tabakov1*, (1) King's College London, London, UK; EMITEL Coordinator; President IOMP
Presentations
MO-DE-201-4 (Monday, July 31, 2017) 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM Room: 201
Purpose: To present the educational concept and global impact of the unique reference online tool EMITEL e-Encyclopaedia of Medical Physics. EMITEL is widely-used free educational resource (www.emitel2.eu). It was developed by an international team of 109 specialists from 25 countries, supported by EU-project. The paper highlights EMITEL paradigm and its global use.
Methods: The presentation is based on original statistics of the EMITEL web server, including overall usage, geographical spread and technology of access in the period 2010-2016. The statistical data is topped up by Questionnaires of users from more than 50 low-resource countries, mainly at the ICTP Medical Physics College.
Results: EMITEL includes 3100 encyclopaedic articles with over 2000 illustrations (overall volume c.2100 pages). The development followed original methodology, using the concept of large number of alphabetically arranged topical articles (based on our previously developed Medical Physics Thesaurus). The articles were arranged in 7 professional sub-categories. Each article passed several stages of development and refereeing by experts, plus testing by MSc students. This was aimed at enhancing the educational value of articles. All project development was handled by specially developed web site and online database, which currently supports EMITEL updates. The first international use of EMITEL was by 60 students from 38 countries, which was followed by questionnaires, showing 80% approval of the material. The Web statistics of the use of EMITEL shows the global number of users per month varying between 2500 and 5000.
Conclusion: EMITEL proves to be a very useful reference tool which is providing continuous help for the education of many colleagues from low-resource countries. To assist its further dissemination, a Multi-lingual Medical Physics e-Dictionary has been added, translating terms in 29 languages. Our feedback shows the value of the latter for the better understanding of the mainly English-language professional publications in low-resource countries.
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