ABSTRACT
Postgraduate medical education in the UK has undergone significant change in recent years. Primarily, this is because of the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) which means that a trainee’s working week is an average maximum of 48 hours, resulting in a time constraint on training which could result in a discontinuity of a trainee’s experience due to increasingly distributed rotation rotas. As part of an overall approach to the continuous review and improvement of medical training in light of the EWTD, the role that new and emerging technologies can play has received renewed interest. Indeed, the ‘application of learning technologies’ has been identified as an emerging theme in the medical education literature (Harden, 2006). However, we argue that in order to make appropriate use of learning technologies in medical training, a more significant focus needs to be placed on learning design and design methodologies. By learning design, we mean the design of the software applications and their associated activities within a teaching context.
