In this post, I should like to explain the purpose of the Law and Medicine Project. I use the word 'project' probably as project managers would use it. The project is a temporary service here in existence to provide a website for professional education. I define professional education as postgraduate education for the MRCP(UK) exam in general medicine, or the GDL examination in law. It has a defined time period. In other words, I wish to launch the website in January 2009 (mid-way though). We have a budget for producing a product - that product is a website for members-only for students, from which you can download learning materials. You can also use the website to take part in discussion with peers who are also interested in law or medicine, thus encouraging intellectual discussion across these two similar disciplines.
For the purpose of this blog, the project needs to be started and initiated. I am the Company Director of our management team. There is also a Director of Medical Education who will feedback what the 'users' need, the users being students of medicine. It is hoped that one day we will have a Director of Legal Education to do a corresponding role for the legal education. We also have a Director of IT and e-learning to commit resources for providing the computer platform to achieve this product. Finally, not part of the project team, we have a Director of Finance to make the company work.
Law and Medicine Limited was incorporated in 2009. We intend to be promoting the website before its launch through a combination of SEO and social media marketing. After discussions elsewhere, it appears that SEO is a good long-term investment, whereas social media such as Twitter or Facebook may be good at people being engaged in the short-term. I have even had the idea of bolting on a social network to our website, so that users can have their own individual profile, following on the success of networks such as LinkedIn. We want it to be 'cool' (or whatever the word is) for people to take part in education. Instead of using off-the-shelf open source programs such as Elgg, which are prone to bugs, the Director of IT and e-learning intends to program this from scratch. At the moment, we are finishing off the design of the website by providing a self-assessment area where students can do tests (for the MRCP courses) to monitor their progress.
This is a very unique project, and experimental. But by using well recognised processes and themes in project management, we hope to minimise risks of failure, and, by comparing ourselves to other education providers, hope to develop a workable business strategy. Our blog will be a diary of our progress.
