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About This Site

Origin of the Name

The name "AI Kotohajime" (AI事始) draws on Sugita Genpaku's Rangaku Kotohajime (The Beginnings of Dutch Learning), written by the Edo-period physician of Dutch medicine. With almost no teacher to guide them, the scholars of that era worked their way, largely by trial and error, through Tāheru Anatomia, a Dutch-language anatomy text. We see a parallel between those pioneers and today's healthcare professionals, who are likewise teaching themselves to work with the new tool of generative AI.

Design Principles

This site is built on the following four principles.

  1. Do not add to teachers' workload. A teacher's job is only to send a link and say, "Take a look at this."
  2. Learners can complete the entire journey — the experience itself, the feedback, and issuing a certificate — on their own, without anyone's help.
  3. A single administrator can maintain the site by editing only Markdown. The authoritative source for the AI instruction prompts is likewise Markdown, managed within this repository.
  4. The site retains no user logs or personal information whatsoever. (Saving quiz-passing status to localStorage takes place entirely on the learner's own device, so it does not conflict with this principle.)

Operating Structure

  • Operating entity: TBD (to be determined)
  • Supervision structure: TBD (to be determined)
  • License: TBD (CC BY 4.0 is under consideration as a candidate)

Reporting Errors and Requesting Improvements

This site is developed as open source, and we accept reports of errors in the content (typos, broken links, inaccuracies, and so on) and requests for improvement through Issues on the GitHub repository. Please follow the steps below.

  1. Check the existing issues — Open the issue list and check whether the same point has already been reported (no account is needed just to browse).
  2. Create a new issue — On the new issue page, fill in a title and description and submit it (posting requires a free GitHub account). You are welcome to write in either English or Japanese.
  3. Include the following in your report:
    • The URL of the page concerned (or the unit/page name)
    • What you noticed (typo / broken link / factual error / layout problem / suggestion)
    • For display problems, the browser and device you are using

Issues are public and visible to anyone

Never include personal information — including any patient information — or anything else that cannot be made public in an issue.

A contact channel for those without a GitHub account is in preparation (it will be set up once the operating entity is finalized).

References We Drew On

In planning this site, we drew on presentations from the symposium series "Generative AI and Healthcare Professional Education: Connecting Theory, Practice, and Ethics," hosted by the ICT Education Committee of the Japan Society for Medical Education (JSME).

Each unit's "Reference Materials" section also links to publicly available materials from the relevant session.