INTRODUCTION:Dermatological disorders are common in medical practice. In medical school, however, the time devoted to teaching dermatology is usually very limited. Therefore, online educational systems have increasingly been used in medical education settings to enhance exposure to dermatology.OBJECTIVE:The present study was designed to develop an e-learning program for medical students in dermatology and evaluate the impact of this program on learning.METHODS:This prospective study included second year medical students at the University of Technology and Science, Salvador, Brazil. All students attended discussion seminars and practical activities, and half of the students had adjunct online seminars (blended learning). Tests were given to all students before and after the courses, and test scores were evaluated.RESULTS:Students who participated in online discussions associated with face-to-face activities (blended learning) had significantly higher posttest scores (9.0±0.8) than those who only participated in classes (7.75±1.8, p <0.01).CONCLUSIONS:The results indicate that an associated online course might improve the learning of medical students in dermatology.

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In our research, we have been concerned with the question of how to make relevant features of security situations visible to users in order to allow them to make informed decisions regarding potential privacy and security problems, as well as regarding potential implications of their actions. To this end, we have designed technical infrastructures that make visible the configurations, activities, and implications of available security mechanisms. This thus allows users to make informed choices and take coordinated and appropriate actions when necessary. This work differs from the more traditional security usability work in that our focus is not only on the usability of security mechanism (e.g., the ease-of-use of an access control interface), but how security can manifest itself as part of people's interactions with and through information systems (i.e., how people experience and interpret privacy and security situations, and are enabled or constrained by existing technological mechanisms to act appropriately). In this paper, we report our experiences designing, developing, and testing two technical infrastructures for supporting this approach for usable security.

Publish/subscribe infrastructures, specifically notification servers, are used in a large spectrum of distributed applications as their basic communication and integration infrastructure. With their recent popularization, notification servers are being developed to support specific application domains. At the same time, generalpurpose notification servers provide a large set of functionality for a broad set of applications. With so many options, developers face the dilemma of choosing between application-specific or generalpurpose notification servers. In both cases, however, the set of features provided by the servers are usually neither extensible nor configurable, making their customization to specific application domains a difficult task. In this work, a more flexible approach is proposed -a customizable, extensible and dynamic architecture for notification services -which allows the customization of the notification service to different application domains. The extensibility model is presented according to the design framework proposed by Rosemblum and Wolf. A preliminary implementation of the prototype is also discussed, as well as configuration examples.

Publish/subscribe infrastructures, specifically notification servers, are used in a large spectrum of distributed applications as their basic communication and integration infrastructure. With their recent popularization, notification servers are being developed to support specific application domains. At the same time, generalpurpose notification servers provide a large set of functionality for a broad set of applications. With so many options, developers face the dilemma of choosing between application-specific or generalpurpose notification servers. In both cases, however, the set of features provided by the servers are usually neither extensible nor configurable, making their customization to specific application domains a difficult task. In this work, a more flexible approach is proposed -a customizable, extensible and dynamic architecture for notification services -which allows the customization of the notification service to different application domains. The extensibility model is presented according to the design framework proposed by Rosemblum and Wolf. A preliminary implementation of the prototype is also discussed, as well as configuration examples.