Telelearning in ophthalmology.

The virtual ophthalmic clinic has been developed to provide an interactive learning platform within the correspondence courses of the Virtual University of Bavaria. It presents clinical case examples from ophthalmology. Basic concepts are a case-based learning dialogue (didactics), peer reviewing (quality), role-based access (organization) and thin web clients (availability). The following requirements had to be fulfilled: Best possible accessibility for students, authors and reviewers; learning control function; comfortable management. The application architecture is based on a relational data base, a ColdFusion (Allaire, Newton, MA, USA) web application server, a standard web server. So far, the application was used in four terms of the virtual university.