One of the elementary goals of the MEFANET project is to advance medical teaching and learning with the use of modern information and communication technologies. As an instrument for that, MEFANET has decided to develop an original and uniform solution for educational web portals which are used, together with a central gate, to offer and share digital educational content. In this way, a unique collaborative environment, which is full of shared resources, is growing.
The educational web portal is an official publication platform of the MEFANET network, which serves for publication of electronic versions of educational works and multimedia teaching materials. Its main task is accessibility to all types of electronic didactic materials developed accross the whole MEFANET network. There are currently eleven portal platforms developed withinh the MEFANET project covered by a central gate that allows for effective searching within the whole content available.
The local portal instances do not replace well-established LMS systems at the medical schools. Compared to the LMS, the educational portal platform provides additional e-publishing tools with well-defined rules for quality assessment. Further, it allows users federated authentication, and so they do not have to create ten separate user accounts for each portal instance.