Margaret Vugrin, Melissa DeSantis, Gale Hannigan, Cathy Montoya. 
CATCHUM Educational Task Force members: Billy U. Philips, Jr., Carol Bertsche, Herb Hagler, Bob Joyce, Larry Laufman, Gita Varagoor
Texas Tech Health Sciences Center Library
Lubbock, TX  79430 (U.S.A.)
librmv@ttuhsc.edu

The CATCHUM Project covers the entire geographic area of the state of Texas, over 267,000 square miles, roughly equivalent to the countries of the Balkan Peninsula.  The CATCHUM Project is a consortium of eight Texas Medical Schools dedicated to educating undergraduate medical students about cancer prevention and screening. Together the eight medical schools teach over 1,000 students. Based at UTMB, in Galveston, TX, the CATCHUM Project is funded by NCI (Grant # 1 R25 CA65618). The Educational Technology Task-Force mission is to bring information resources and tools to all of CATCHUM. Although Texas has an excellent infrastructure of roads and airline traffic, distances between the eight medical schools are vast and travel can be time consuming. We have experimented with conferencing tools to enable easier and cheaper group interaction. We have face-to-face meetings but have supplemented them with "virtual meetings" using AOL Instant Messenger and WebCT as well as two other net conferencing utilities. Using this mixed modality communication system we have updated and improved our homepage, created a Medical Informatics Problem-Based Learning module, and are in the process of designing a web-based course on cancer education for 4th year medical students.