? ? The Mobile Access Resource Project (MARP) aims to dramatically improve electronic communication with and for medical students in a community-based, problem-based learning medical school. Students at the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) at the University of Hawaii accomplish much of their learning in the community setting. The student body is often dispersed across several different community facilities, each with its own network security issues and limitations on computer access. MARP will provide training, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and national wireless network access to thirty medical students, with the long-term goal of making the system available to all. Through this platform, students will have anytime, anywhere access to National Library of Medicine databases to research context-specific learning objectives. Journal searches will be routed through University servers to allow for on-the-fly construction of personal Webpages with archived search results, and links to the local medical library for later study and full-text retrieval. Additionally, the improved connectivity of the students will be leveraged to collect more timely administrative data by the host medical school (JABSOM). This data is currently collected by hand, and includes course evaluations, patient encounter and procedure logs. This data is extremely useful for tracking student activities, responding to curricular needs, and providing mandated reporting to accrediting bodies. Furthermore, since students are often decentralized, an anytime anywhere method of distributing general announcements and advisories will be valuable to administering student schedules. Since the wireless communications will be routed through University servers, all data collected can be used to populate the personalized Webpages for students to track their progress within the curriculum. At the end of the project, students with the MARP equipment and training will be compared to those students without on several outcomes. These include: 1) measures of comfort level and facility of students with PDAs for clinical/educational application; 2) measures of ability to find relevant literature using NLM databases in a test environment; and 3) comparison of quantity and quality of reporting and data collection from the students with MARP to those without. ? ? ?
