IUSM Educational Technology

I met with Megan Palmer and Jon Eynon today from the Dean’s office. They were interested in getting an overview of how ANGEL is used at IUSM and what can be done to get teaching faculty to increase their knowledge and use of technology in their courses. Megan is organizing an instructional technology expo for faculty to come and get some ideas about how to use technology as a learning tool. I will be there to demonstrate ANGEL and to cooperate on informal training.

Today I jumped around inside Angel courses a bit, showed them what students see when they use Angel and talked about how Angel has become a portal to most resources available for students. Jon was interested to know that HTML content can be developed and zipped up for easy importing into Angel. I showed them the Anesthesia cases, which are admittedly a bit dated now, but a good example of how HTML content that spans multiple pages can be brought into Angel.

Megan would like to come to a consensus about what workstation tools faculty will need to develop effective online courses, and pass that to ISTM as a standard “Angel build”. That way, faculty could request this and their PCs would then have what is needed, and could be supported in a standard way. We also discussed how Angel courses need to have some minimum standards, such as a syllabus and best practices for uploading and displaying course content.

At the IUSM, we do not have any faculty teaching and development staff, although in the past year some library faculty have become more proficient in ANGEL and are doing some of this. Because of this, Angel usage is across the board. Some faculty use Angel to post a course schedule only, some as a document repository, and still others use many more functions such as discussion forums and interactive content. The push to use Angel has not come from the School since MECA lost Dianne Wyman a number of years back. For myself, as the Angel administator and go-to Angel person, I certainly have the skills to do this but not the time within my current role. I indicated in the meeting today that I was glad to see an effort towards instructional technology from the school level, and would be glad to work together with others to raise the awareness of what faculty can do with technology that is available right now.

I’ve been fortunate to meet a couple of doctors from Kenya who are visiting through the Moi partnership with Indiana University. Dr. Okoth, whom I know as Biko, comes into our office quite frequently. He became friends with Wilfredo and is interested in PDAs because he believes that this technology would help improve patient care in Kenya. The Kenyan doctors want to test the effectiveness of UpToDate, a medical reference tool, at Moi hospital. This will cost around $300 per device to license. I met recently with Biko, Dr. Faiz Rehmani and Dr. Deb Litzelman to try and make this project work.

My role in the project is to identify affordable hardware and to preload the devices with a survey and data collection method that will help determine the usefulness of the PDAs for the registrars in Kenya. Registrars are somewhat like Residents here in the States if I understand correctly.

I contacted a vendor last week who sells refurbished Palm TX hardware, and I recommended we order 10 of these at a cost of $145 each. The budget for entire project is $5000, so it was good to get capable PDAs cheaply so that money will be available for software licensing. I hoped that the devices had new batteries installed, but the salesperson was not able to tell me this fact. She did assure me that the devices were in excellent condition, and came with a short warranty period. I told the group that if we needed to purchase new batteries it would only cost us around $20 each, and I can replace them. It’s worth the small risk in order to stay within the budget. In this particular case, UpToDate is the cost we’re working around.

I am currently working on an email validation script for the CERTTS Web Forms.  The idea is that 3rd year students will be able to log encounters via the web, rather than or in addition to, the PDA forms.  Since acquiring a signature on the PDA form is a requirement for most encounters, I’m working on developing an email validation script that will confirm completion of the encounter rather than the student needing to get a signature.

Currently the BCS encounter reports have a table containing a checklist of which physical exams have been completed, by students, during certain rotations.  This was requested by Dr. Hilgarth during the 08-09 school year.  Dr. Humbart has recently taken over as Clerkship Director for BCS and has mentioned that some of the other Clerkship Directors would like to have that same checklist (exams related to their clerkship) viewable on their reports.  I have mocked up a similar checklist for the Surgery clerkship and am waiting for final confirmation from Dr. Humbart of which clerkships would like that addition to their reports.  Once I receive the list of clerkships, I will add that feature to their reports.