IUSM Educational Technology

In the last couple of weeks, we have been getting more and more students in the office with concerns of missing Basic Clinical Skills. This is the time of year when this occurs more often. A little bit of research into their reports reveals the encounters that do not have a corresponding BCS entry where the student failed to log the BCS at the time of recording the encounter. I’m looking at creating some code that will match clerkships with BCS entries so that the process will become easier for us to research which clerkships are eligible for a BCS entry and create it accordingly.

The Resident Evaluation Pledge program is completed and ready to put into use. The parser program correctly identifies faculty and residents from the evaluation list, that have signed a pledge form (implemented earlier) more than 7 days prior to the script being run. I will set up the script to run on a weekly basis, every Sunday night at midnight. That way, residents and faculty members that receive an email with the list of students they have yet to evaluate, will receive it on Monday morning. The last item I had yet to solve was the fact that, in testing, the script was not able to send messages to email addresses outside IU. In talking with Michael, it was the SMTP server that was dropping the request to forward the message. That has been corrected with UITS and further testing proved the messages were now reaching outside email addresses.

So far so good. I have held training sessions in Gary, Terre Haute and visiting our campus was Lafayette. Wilfredo traveled with me to Gary and Terre Haute where the training went very well. Michael conducted the first two training sessions with Bloomington and Ft. Wayne, where I came along for the ride to see just how he went about it. I knew that once I saw one or two sessions, I would have it in my mind what issues are most important to touch on in the training. As Michael and I have noticed, the biggest concern seems to be what device is the best to purchase. Students seem to be more and more tech savvy, so setting up the PDA with the appropriate applications doesn’t seem to be their biggest worry. Along with the fact that we are supporting Windows Mobile Devices this year, they’re more concerned with whether a smartphone is better than just a standalone PDA; is Windows Mobile PC better than Palm OS; etc. There are only two training sessions left to conduct; one in Muncie this Friday and the last one in South Bend next Friday.

In order to make a presentation that was succinct for people to watch online, I decided it was best to write out everything that needed to be said during the presentation. It turned out to be around 2000 words, so we will use this text as the basis for the video presentation that students can watch at anytime.

I was informed of a need for a Resident signature pledge form for the hand held devices. Residents are asked to write an evaluation for a student encounter he/she observes. Evaluations are due within 7 days of encounter being signed. I completed a Signature Pledge form that the Residents will sign acknowledging they will provide an evaluation within 7 days. I have also completed about 90% of a script that will read an XML file. This file contains the names of Residents who have signed encounters and have yet to complete an evaluation for the student. The script will read the file, calculate whether the evaluation is 7 days or more past due, and email the Resident if they have signed a Signature Pledge form to let them know that the evaluation is past due.

All of the campus sites except for South Bend have replied to my emails and scheduled a date for us to arrive and provide 2008 PDA training. I emailed South Bend again yesterday to find out what the result was when they polled the students. The contact is out on vacation but received the name and email of the secondary contact. Emailed her and she informed me that she would forward the information and return an email to me ASAP.

There were some field updates to the ICM II web form that I completed about a week ago and between PDA training at a couple of the other sites last week, I completed the updates to the hand held form. The updates have been completed and the forms updated on my hand held and are syncing correctly. When the students sync, the new ICM II hand held form will downloaded.