This fall, students at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine are learning in a wireless zone. First- and second-year students have access to the Internet in large lecture halls and small group conference rooms without having to race for a limited number of cable faceplates or snake tangled wires across floors and around desks. Access points for wireless Internet service have been installed on the third and fourth floors of the medical school building, where classes are held.

The access points act as transmitters whose signals are received by PC cards in laptop computers. These cards are installed in the Dell computers given to the first- and second-year students. Students have wireless access to the Internet from anywhere in the entire east wings of the third and fourth floors.

"I think this really changes the interaction between the faculty and the students," said Thomas M. Nosek, associate dean for biomedical information technologies and architect of the wireless plan for the School of Medicine.

Nosek suggested that with this technology, lecturers can directly interact with students during class time by asking questions online and getting immediate feedback.

He envisions students making use of the electronic curriculum during class. The electronic curriculum provides resources to help the students achieve their learning objectives such as text written by the faculty, animations of mechanisms, reference Web sites and the PowerPoint presentations used by faculty during the lecture. With wireless access to the Internet, students will be able to follow the lecture on the electronic curriculum.

Nosek is also expanding on existing systems that were put in place recently. Last year, all lectures were audio recorded and archived online for the first time. Videos of lectures are made available online at the request of the faculty. Students have indicated that they find the audiostream to be a valuable tool for studying. Last year, an electronic exam system was introduced in which first-year students took all their exams online and received results on a personal Web page.

This fall, the electronic exams contain multimedia capabilities and are used for all first- and second-year examinations. Rather than describing a heartbeat, a question might include an actual audio recording of a heartbeat or color video image of a beating heart. In addition, lecturers in histology and pathology can include color slides from a virtual microscope on the exams. Students can manipulate the image just as they would a slide on a real microscope.

Also starting this year, students in the family medicine rotation are receiving personal digital assistants (PDAs) for the duration of the clerkship as part of a predoctoral grant in family medicine from the Department of Health and Human Services. Jason Chao, associate professor of family medicine, organized the students' receipt of the PDAs.

The PDAs come with programs such as drug catalogs, reference books and a patient-tracking program. At the end of each week, Chao can link all the students' PDAs to a computer and put their patient tracking information into a database to see which patients each students see and whether or not they are getting a broad enough view of family medicine. Nosek and Chao hope that other clinical rotations will investigate the use of PDAs.

"Hopefully, down the road the other clerkships will see the benefits of having the PDAs," Chao said.