Response to ‘Creation of mHealth content aimed at medical students’

Dear Sir

Mr Melton’s letter response to my article is encouraging: it bodes well that medical students are reading Medical Teacher, and the initiative shown in his developing the iBook demonstrates that students are pushing medical teachers in the direction needed.

Mr Melton’s line “With a small amount of help from the faculty and no previous experience of content creation” sums up, I think, the experience of many medical students who wish to pursue this kind of work.

The expansion into other applications, as suggested by Mr Melton is certainly on the cards. Although the target audience of most of our apps were patients, our students were free to choose their target audience, and some apps were aimed at other students.

Other platforms: As Sultan Qaboos University does not issue students with devices, and offers only minimal technical support for m-learning and mHealth (Masters & Al-Rawahi 2012), we need to take into account cross-platform compatibility or at least equivalent systems to iBooks Author (e.g. Book Creator for Android). This is so that project evaluation and grading may be fair.

Similarly, I sincerely hope that Mr Melton’s project may alert faculty at his institution to build such initiatives into their formal curriculum.

Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest.