How students and faculty interact with a searchable online database of the medical curriculum.

Many medical schools currently provide electronic access to their medical curriculum. In order to better develop and evaluate online curricular databases, knowledge of the interaction of students and faculty with such systems is required. The KnowledeMap application provides a web interface for students, faculty and administrators to perform NLP-assisted searches for documents from the entire medical curriculum. The pilot implementation of KM in a first year anatomy course was evaluated. Data was collected from the web-server log files over two years, a paper survey at the end of the course, and structured interviews with students and faculty members. The data showed complete adoption of KM. Analysis of usage patterns showed that most of the students chose to browse for current course material rather than to search for related medical concepts in future courses. Analysis of the interviews identified key concepts relating to the students' utilization of KM for their learning tasks. The impact of KM on medical pedagogy is discussed in light of our results.