IUSM Educational Technology

Dr. Hilgarth expressed a need for the ICM-II reports to resemble other reports on the CERTTS system.  I’ve modified the ICM-II report to reflect numbers of encounters completed based on the group a procedure falls under rather than the individual procedure itself.  I will be adding a drop-down faculty list to the Palm forms and the Web forms for ICM-II as soon as I receive a reply from Dr. Hilgarth about the groups the students fall under.

I came across an issue with the clerkship reports when we try to create a BCS record from a clerkship encounter.  When the students fail to select ‘Log a Basic Clinical Skill’ when they fill out a clerkship form, we can go into the encounter and manually create the BCS record.  The issue was related to when the exam options changed for BCS encounters based on which clerkship the student is in.  Certain exams are only permitted to be logged during specific rotations.  When the change was made in the forms for the handheld, the admin options were not updated.  The update was made and the admin tools now reflect the correct procedure drop down lists depending on which rotation the encounter is logged.

Last week I decided to upgrade our installation of ANGEL ePortfolio, since we were having problems with our current version anyway. The problem was that ePortfolios designed using a custom template were causing an application error in ePortfolio 2.0.2. Since most all of our ePortfolios were built using the custom competency template, just about everyone was unable to edit their portfolios. After reading the upgrade notes that were made available with the release of 2.1, I was ready to get our system upgraded on Monday night. The evening did not go well, there were 15 SQL errors in total, mostly some ALTER TABLE commands, and then a few queries bombed due to a column that was not created during the upgrade process. Because of this, I had to disable access to our ePortfolio system. I opened up a ticket with ANGEL Learning, and also began investigating the problem myself as I waited for their reply. First, I installed a clean copy of ePortfolio 2.1 on the development server so that I had an example of how the database should look. I then added the missing columns to a couple tables and updated some of the stored procedures. This took a couple days of investigating. By Thursday, I had the database ready and was going to re-run the 2.1 installer without upgrading the database.

Before I could do this, ANGEL Learning responded that they had released a new installer that would take care of our problems. Meanwhile, we had a few upset users and the director was not pleased with the phone calls she was fielding. Since the installer required an IIS reset, I had to wait until the evening to run it. Thursday evening I restored the database from 2.0.2 and removed the 2.1 database that had been manually upgraded. The installer ran much better this time, no errors, and all of the ePortfolios seemed to be available.

On Friday, Dr. Johnson emailed and said that although her portfolios, and the portfolios for her test account were available via the URL, she could not see them inside the ePortfolio interface. I verified that this was the case, and opened up another ticket with ANGEL Learning. On Monday, Gina from AL called, and she went through the ePortfolio database with me and pointed out some inconsistencies and walked me through the tables which link ePortfolios to their respective user accounts. For some reason, the link between ANGEL and ePortfolio was not creating an account for Dr. Johnson, and there were some duplicate account issues to be resolved. We did not solve the problems during that session, but she had some questions for the developer to ask and would get back to me. With the information from the phone call, I was able to get Dr. Johnson’s test account, Daffy Duck, linked back to the ePortfolios that were created under that account before lunch. After lunch, Gina had responded back with some queries to take care of the other account. Since ePortfolio didn’t seem to be creating an account for Dr. Johnson, we inserted a row with a specific person_id that linked to the orphaned ePortfolios. A few deleted rows and a bit of cleanup later, things were working normally again.

A request from Carole Gall to install Reference Manager for all the machines in B16A lab for her new class this month.