The promise of E-learning will be on full display starting Dec. 4 when emergency-room physicians around the country meet online for a course on bioterrorism intervention. In hospitals nationwide, medical personal are scrambling to get the latest information on how to recognize and treat anthrax, small pox, and other diseases that are believed to be potential terrorist tools. In order to combat the lack of current information, the University of Tennessee and the Detroit Medical Center are working together to provide a free, real-time course taught by 20 emergency medical practitioners with expertise in bioterrorism agents. They expect 10% of the nation's 30,000 emergency-room physicians to take the three-hour course.

The course, called BT101 (registration information at www.pemba.utk.edu/bt101/), is made possible by the University of Tennessee's familiarity with E-learning software from Centra Software Inc., which it has been using for the past four years to offer an online executive MBA course for physicians. Michael Stahl, a professor at University of Tennessee and the director of the online MBA program, says it's because of the experience garnered in those four years that the bioterrorism course could be offered so quickly after the events of Sept. 11. Stahl says the experts teaching the course will be doing so from their offices, homes, or hotel rooms, and that the 100 physicians who will be logged in during individual course sessions will be able to do so via a dial-up connection.

Thanks to the voice-over-IP capability of the Centra software, participants with properly equipped computers will be able to not only hear what the instructors are saying in real time, they'll also be able to ask questions and have other participants hear them, as if they were in a classroom together. "You can do almost anything with the software that you can in a classroom, except that you can't see my face," says Stahl. Claire Schooley, an analyst with Giga Information Group, says the course's focus on critical information rather than snazzy video or graphics highlights the potential of E-learning applications. "It's exactly what E-learning can do, and do well," says Schooley.

Liz Bauer, clinical manager of the emergency room at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., says the course is a very timely one for an industry desperate for information. "All emergency rooms are looking at how we're going to educate everyone about bioterrorism," says Bauer. Because El Camino is in a region--Silicon Valley--that is among the most prepared in the nation for bioterrorist attacks, she doesn't expect doctors there to participate in the online course, but she says it should prove helpful for smaller, lesser-equipped hospitals. She also hopes it will be offered to primary care physicians, whom she says are really the first line of defense against outbreaks. Stahl agrees, and he says that while the first round of courses will focus on emergency-room physicians, if enough family doctors, pediatricians, and ear, nose and throat specialists inquire about the course, it subsequently will be offered to them.