MERLOT has launched a portal on Developing and Delivering Online and Hybrid Courses.  The portal is designed to facilitate strategic planning related to online course design and delivery, development of best practices, and location of existing courses that can be reused or adapted.  The Portal is accessible at http://onlinecourses.merlot.org/ and includes case studies of institutional initiatives, faculty development resources, online courses, links to outside resources, and a showcase that highlights courses integrating publisher resources with MERLOT resources. Content on the site is available under a Creative Commons License and MERLOT Acceptable Use Policy designed to promote use by faculty and students of higher education. MERLOT is the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, a searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education online learning materials. For more information, visit: http://www.merlot.org/

The Polish Minister of Health in collaboration with the eViP project has organized the first International Conference on Virtual Patients to take place in Krakow, Poland June 5-6, 2009. Virtual patients are computer simulations of real-life clinical scenarios for the purpose of education in medicine, nursing or dentistry. The aim of the conference is to promote usage of virtual patients in medical curricula. Conference proceeding will be published in a special issue of the Bio-Algorithms and Med-Systems Journal entirely devoted to the topic of virtual patients. Abstracts may be submitted by 31 December 2008. For more information, visit: http://icvp09.cm-uj.krakow.pl/

The International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) in conjunction with Slice of Life and the Group for Research in Pathology Education and the Team-Based Learning Collaborative is now accepting abstracts for its 2009 meeting.  The conference will take place in Leiden, The Netherlands from June 29 - July 3, 2009 and includes several sessions on e-learning.