IUSM Educational Technology

The Angel team was contacted by Dr. Thurston about setting up the gradebook in Angel to upload and store test results for the Medical Genetics course.  I spent a little while finding out the format that the gradebook uses to import grades, and uploaded a  .csv format from the spreadsheet that Dr. Thurston provided, and was able to give her a template and brief instructions on how to setup the Angel gradebook for a course.  During our consultation time, she mentioned that she was at a meeting with all of the course directors and that most if not all of them wanted to have the feature of posting exam grades on Angel, for each student to view privately under their own log in.  It was discussed that there would be a high request very soon for this from a lot of course directors.

Also, it was mentioned that the current online video tutorial about how to setup the Angel gradebook is not very helpful and intuitive.  This is the tutorial that links from Angel learning.

Continuing from a previous post, there was a need for an Admin tool on CERTTS to move an encounter to another year’s reporting.  The issue of encounters reporting in the wrong year stems from this.  If a student hasn’t synced their handheld prior to the start of a new school year (when Pendragon Forms are updated and published), their handheld still has an outdated form.  Their encounter will still record and upload to Pendragon, but the data will sync to an old database table.  There is also an issue with students that are making up encounters that they have failed to complete for a previous year.  Those encounters will sync to the current table, but need to be recorded in last year’s data.  Therefore, a need arised for the ability to simply copy that data to another db table.  The admin tool allows us to select the encounter that is reporting incorrectly and then select the reporting year that it should be in.  Once submitted, the tool copies all of the encounter data into the selected year’s database, fixing the error.  This also prompted me to modify the current admin tool that allows us to manually sync forms data to include old forms, so that the process of moving the encounter would be quicker for the student.

I have been working with Dr. Nouri over the past few weeks to get him up to speed with creating content in ANGEL. When he has free afternoons, he comes over with questions. He has decided to create an HTML page for the group which links to content in the group. He wasn’t happy with the plain looking layout, so I suggested that he finish creating all the links and then draw me a picture or diagram of what he wants, or show me a similar layout that exists somewhere else on the web. One of our team can then create the page the way he wants it to look. He has an extensive amount of material he wants to be on the site based on 6 competencies that anesthesia residents must show proficiency in. Further down the line he would like to include material for students and fellows as well.

Along with this, there are 8 lectures during a residency block that Dr. Nouri would like to be made available on Angel. Doug and myself are going to arrange for the lecture to be recorded, and one of us will create a narrated powerpoint presentation from the lecturer’s original slides and audio. We’ll then convert this to Impatica and make the show available in the group. I mentioned to Dr. Nouri that we use Impatica for a couple reasons. First, it makes the material available to Windows/Mac users and others. Second and probably more important in this case, it protects the intellectual property rights of the author since the original powerpoint is not posted for all to download.

I had a student in the office yesterday that needed a BCS encounter moved from the current CET database to the previous year’s database.  It was an encounter dated for the previous year’s requirements but was not showing on his 07-08 BCS reports.  Looking at the forms data, his form uploaded correctly, but was reporting in this year’s reports.  This is a natural occurrence due to the fact that data is now synced from the Pendragon database to the current year CET database.  It was a simple process of extracting the data from the current CET database and inserting it into the previous year’s database.  His encounter now reports in the correct year’s data.  This prompted discussion between Mike and I about creating an Admin tool that would perform this process, rather than having to manually move the data.  After pulling some additional ICM-II data for Dr. Hilgarth, I will begin creating the tool needed to perform the data move.

Since October of 2006, ET has been charging $35 per hour for technology services which go beyond the free services we provide. Today, one of our staff members spent 4 hours rebuilding a laptop that had been infected with a virus. A rebuild includes backup of personal files, format and reinstall of Windows, downloading and installing hardware drivers and restoring personal files.

When the repair was complete, the staff member texted the customer with the total cost of the service. The customer came in but stated that he understood that the charges would be $35 in total, not per hour. After a short period of disagreement, I decided that the customer would be charged $35. To prevent this from happening in the future, I authored a policy that will be presented to, and signed by, the customer before services are performed. The policy was distributed to the department’s financial director and to ET staff.

I’ve recently had a student that stated she synced forms to CERTTS but did not see any of her encounters in her reports.  She had logged a few other encounters in her palm and synced again.  The second time, the new encounters showed up on her reports.  That prompted me to think she had old forms on her palm and had not synced for some time prior to her first sync issue.  Looking through the old forms data, I found encounters of hers, for the date she stated, that were waiting to be synced.  I modified the CERTTS autosync script to sync old forms data and her reports now reflect her entire list of encounters.

Over the past several days I’ve been pulling data from the CERTTS system into spreadsheets.  Neurology needed data from the 07-08 school year for LCME and Dr. Hilgarth needed data for ICM-II reviews from the previous 3 years.  All data has been exported and those spreadsheets forwarded on to the appropriate persons for review.  I’m awaiting any requests for modifications to the data or any additional data they may need.

I was notified recently that a few students had scored unusually high grades on a test that is distributed through a course on Angel. This particular course is used by all of the centers and managed by two faculty members. When properly managed, this course makes the test available when scheduled to the appropriate faculty and students. The course uses access rights that are team-based.

It was discovered about 3 weeks ago that one of the course mentors was able to see the final test sometime in August, and assumed it was a practice test to be used as a study aid. The mentor saved the Angel page into a MS Word file and emailed it to students. I was asked why the mentor was able to see the test. When I looked at the Angel course recently, the access rights were correct - mentors could not see the final test, nor could students. In order to determine the problem, Angel had to be restored as it existed in August to have a closer look.

Looking through the backup library, I pulled out the Angel DB as it existed on 8/15/08 and restored that database to our Angel development server. When looking at the course in question, I found that the access rights at the time granted final test view rights to the mentor who distributed the test. I reported to the course editors what I had found and determined that the access rights would need to be checked closely in the future. The “user preview” tool in Angel is the best way to double-check that access rights are correct. With this tool, you can easily preview a course as a user that has lower access rights.