A national university network for online teaching of pathology in France Authors : Philippe Bertheau (1), Jean Boutonnat (2), Christiane Copie (3), Guillaume Gauchotte (4), Stéphane Garcia (5), Valérie Rigau (6), Françoise Galateau-Salle (7), Benoit Terris (8), Béatrice Vergier (9), Maxime Battistella (1), David Ameisen (1), Dominique Wendum (10) and the working group& of the french College of Pathologists (CoPath/CUFP, &Universities of : Aix-Marseille (5), Angers, Besançon, Bordeaux (9), Caen (7), Grenoble (2), Montpellier (6), Nancy (4), Nice, Paris Descartes (8), Paris Diderot (1), Paris Sud, Paris Est Créteil (3), Paris Pierre et Marie Curie (10), Paris 13, Rouen, Toulouse, Versailles St Quentin. Abstract : Background: Building online teaching materials is a highly time consuming task for teachers of a single university. Also, when each university creates its own teaching material, this will often lead to duplicated contents, representing a big waste of teacher time and energy. We initiated in 2011 a french national university network for building mutualized online teaching pathology cases and tests. Methods: Eighteen french universities are associated to this project. One national e-learning Moodle platform ( ) contains texts and URL pointing toward virtual slides that are decentralized in the universities. Each university has the responsibility of its own slide scanning, file storage and online display with virtual slide viewers. Results: The Moodle interface has been explained to the teachers since september 2011 using web-based conferences with screen-sharing. The following contents have been created: - 20 clinical cases (12 complete, 7 being developed). Some cases that include questions without answers can be used by students to prepare online lessons that will be taught afterwards in class-rooms. - 1 autoevaluation test for 3rd year medical students. - several gross examination videos. All contents are freely available, as required by UNF3S ( which funds this project, but students have to register to access Moodle tests. Contents have been distributed in different difficulty levels. All contents are written in french but one case has been translated into english for illustrating this communication ( (use “login as a guest”). The Moodle test module allows many types of shared questions, making it easy to create personalized tests. Contents will be validated by a teaching committee and will be opened to students in Conclusions: Future challenges include the development of true online examinations, requiring high bandwidth levels and university directories compatibility. This online material with a national validation will provide students with numerous and high quality contents in pathology. However, it must be kept in mind that e-learning is a huge work for teachers not only during the first years of implementation but also later to update the contents.