As medical schools make use of an increasing variety of clinical teaching settings, it is of interest to find that that there is very little published research that explores the actual learning activities undertaken by students in different environments. This study was designed to describe and analyse a typical week for students learning the same curricular material in one of three Australian settings: an urban tertiary teaching hospital, a remote secondary referral hospital and a rural community-based programme. Twenty-eight students completed week-long learning logs in weeks 9 and 35 of a 40-week academic year. Each student recorded his or her activity in 15-minute intervals for each week. Analysis of these data revealed that, compared with the hospital-based students, the community-based students reported greater patient contact, more time spent in clinical settings and increased time supervised by experienced clinicians. Whilst the community-based students valued their learning in clinical settings more highly than the learning they undertook at their home, the opposite was found for the tertiary hospital-based students. This study, the first to compare student activity in these three prototypical settings in the medical education literature, provides empirical evidence supporting community-based programmes as credible alternatives to traditional teaching hospital-based environments.