Virtual universities

A book review in this section looks at the concept of online learning. It may be a while before e-learning totally supersedes our existing medical education, but the internet looks set radically to change the way in which we learn medicine. In September, the Cyber Medical College, an online virtual healthcare education portal, was launched at the British Association Festival of Science in Glasgow www.cybermedicalcollege.com. The website aims to provide access to postgraduate training and continuing professional development for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers.

As yet there are no colleges claiming to offer e-medical degrees, but one Brazilian site, VUniversity http:// sansao19.virtualave.net, aims to provide net users with online classes in all academic subjects, including medicine.

Elsewhere on the web there are a huge number of virtual universities offering courses in a variety of subjects. http://vu.org, based in California, claims to be the world's largest, with over 500 000 students and alumni in 128 countries. The African Virtual University www.avu.org, “a university without walls,” aims to provide countries in subsaharan Africa with access to high quality academic resources. Europe's first virtual university http://cvu.strath.ac.uk draws on the strengths of five academic institutes in Scotland. There is also a Tamil virtual university www.tamilvu.org bringing net based learning material regarding Tamil culture to the online community.

A great deal of literature has been published about e-learning and virtual universities. Virtual University Gazette www.geteducated.com/vugaz.htm is a monthly newsletter covering all aspects of the internet university movement. Virtual University Journal www.irdc. com/virtual-university-press/vuj/ welcome.htm also publishes papers relating to the field of distance learning.