A broad-band distance education system integrates new computer and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) network technology to establish a real-time high quality two-way videoconference system. Through the system, class locations can be extended. and education can be personalized. The NII (National Information Infrastructure) broad-band distance education system began its pilot project in July 1995. As a collaborating institution, the National Taiwan University College of Medicine, (NTUCM) announced a general medical education course health promotion as a trial distance education course. The course was an elective course open to the whole campus and two other universities. Using a questionnaire, we investigated the course's effectiveness and compared it with a traditional lecture course. One hundred seventy five students attended the class, 77% of them from the College of Law. The questionnaire showed the overall satisfaction was about 60% for the course and distance education system. The satisfaction of the audio (75%) was better than the video (50%) and computer presentations (40%). The satisfaction with course content presentation was 70%. In the other items concenning course content, teacher and course management, satisfactions was around 40%. The poorest results (10%) were found in student the interaction in class. In another questionnaire comparing the two education systems, the distance education course was rated better than the traditional lecture for many items including course content, teacher and classroom arrangement but student interaction in class was again rated low. Increases in numbers of students and classrooms made interaction among students and teacher in a distance education class difficult. Including mailing lists, bulletin board systems, and the World Wide Web as supplements to the course could be the solution. In the future NTUCM will integrate the Internet, narrow-and ISDN, and broad-band DSI, DS3 and ATM networks, to collaborate with the telemedicine project of National Taiwan University Hospital and affiliated teaching hospitals to develop a medical distance education program combining clinical teaching and consultation training. we expect to establish a national medical network for medical education.