OMERAD banner February 2017

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In This Issue:

director
Director's Message
OMERAD Director Randi Stanulis
Dr. Randi N. Stanulis
In my new role in OMERAD I have been exploring resources that we have in place to support faculty in teaching. As I re-read an article authored by Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball and her colleague Francesca Forzani, it made me think about resources on our CHM Educator site that could help faculty in your daily work. Dr. Ball formerly was the Dean of University of Michigan's School of Education and earlier in her career she was a faculty member in MSU's College of Education.

Ball and Forzani (2011) wrote that teachers need to "know their students well-not only their personalities and preferences, but also their ideas about subjects and their ways of thinking about them, including their intellectual habits, misconceptions and interests... They must understand the ways in which students' personal and cultural backgrounds bear on their work in school..." (p. 20).

Even if you have visited the CHM Educator site before, it can be helpful to reorient to some potentially useful information as you plan for teaching. Here are a few links that might be helpful:

- In your Office, At the Bedside
Students have different learning styles. A quick review of the VARK framework may help engage more students in learning. See PDF. 
 
- In your Office
Providing constructive feedback is critical to the student's development and improvement. (PDF).

- Teaching in Small Groups
Knowing your students as learners can help foster a learning environment where students flourish. (PDF). 
 
- Teaching in Small Groups
Implementing neurologically-studied educational strategies can impact learning. (PDF). 
 
- In a Lecture
Using active learning techniques during a lecture promote student engagement and help students develop a deeper understanding of content. (PDF)

For access to the entire article by Ball and Forzani,see Building a Common Core for Learning to Teach.  
 
Randi N. Stanulis, Ph.D.
Director
Office of Medical Education Research and Development
College of Human Medicine 
Professor, Department of Teacher Education
announcements
Announcements
- 2017 CGEA Regional Spring Meeting Registration
 
The AAMC Central Group on Educational Affairs Spring Conference is March 29-31, 2017 in Chicago. The main conference will take place on Thursday and Friday, with pre-conference activities on Wednesday. 
 
The CGEA Meeting is hosted by the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and will take place at the Hyatt Chicago Magnificent Mile. 
 
Using a variety of learning strategies, this conference aims to establish a forum for disseminating best practices in medical education and to equip medical educators with the necessary skills to develop, implement, and maintain successful curricular programs at all levels of training.

For more information 
and to register for the conference, please visit: 

*Early bird registration ends February 27,2017.
 
- Registration Now Open for the IAMSE Spring Seminar Series Sponsored by OMERAD.

The IAMSE webinar Spring series theme is " Remediation in Health Sciences Education." 
 
All sessions are from 12:00-1:00 pm ET: 
    - March 2: Remediation of basic science in integrated blocks; Giulia Bonaminio, Jeanette Guerrasio

    - March 9: Remediation of "High Stakes" professional exams; Aubrey Knight, Nicole Wadsworth, Pat Kenney-Moore

    - March 16: Trust and Remediation: Entrustable Professional Activities and Trust Decisions; Brian Martin

    - March 23: Sharing Assessment Information: Why, How, and What to Consider; Lynn Cleary

    - March 30: Remediation of Gaps in Clinical Skills--One Size Fits One; Cate Nicholas, Camilla Curren
Please note that free access to the OMERAD IAMSE seminar series is limited to CHM faculty and staff only. This includes anyone who has an MSU-CHM appointment and interacts or works with CHM students.
 
For more information about the upcoming series and to register please visit:  http://omerad.msu.edu/seminars/index.html 
 
Benefits of registration:

  

- Receive weekly reminders and instructions with access codes for weekly webinars.

- Access to recorded videos of seminar sessions as your own schedule allows (in case you can't attend the session at the time of broadcast).

- Links to downloadable presentation handouts and discussion forum.

 
For any questions related to registration and access to the IAMSE webinars, please contact: Geraud Plantegenest, Geraud.Plantegenest@hc.msu.edu 
   
BCLR
B-CLR Featured Project: Creating Mini-Lectures with Web Accessibility in Mind
The College of Human Medicine Division of Anatomy and the Blended Curricular Learning Resources group in OMERAD collaborated in the design and development of a set of mini-lectures that integrated several core elements of web accessibility when adapting a two-hour live lecture block on Embryology. The video series helped enhance the learning environment for a variety of student types with a range of educational requirements.

The design team (Dr.  Maureen Schaefer, Mr. Plantegenest) utilized best practices for content design and delivery of accessible videos that support student learning by incorporating the following features in each mini-­lecture:
  • Video captions
  • Video annotations with zooming-panning animations
  • Scripts and narrated audio
  • Downloadable text version of scripts
  • Relevant images and color contrast  
  • Scaffolding of content to reduce cognitive overload
Mini-Lecture Design and Delivery

- Pre-production
PowerPoint files for each lecture were created. These were organized into a series of bite sized chunks (5-10 minutes) following a logical framework of information. Scripts were written to enable concise content delivery and to facilitate post production captioning. Drawings and punctuated text was added to various slides to highlight key points.

Lecture image

- Recording
A tabletPC with a digital pen and Camtasia Studio software was used to record narrated audio and on screen drawings. Annotation color selections was based on that which provided the best contrast for visually impaired students while also avoiding certain colors (red, yellow and blue) that have been traditionally linked to specific embryological tissue types.

Color blindness image

- Mini-Lecture Publishing
MSU Kaltura MediaSpace was chosen as the platform to host the lecture files. It supports accessibility features for video captioning and employs an accessible media player with basic video controls for video delivery.

Accessible player imaqe

The mini-lectures series was integrated with a Preparatory Learning Material (PLM) guide that was used to instruct students as to the sequence in which to watch the videos. Granular learning objectives associated with each mini-lecture were also included in the PLM to underscore important concepts for the students.

PLM content guide

For more information about this curricular project, please contact: Geraud Plantegenest at ( Geraud.Plantegenest@hc.msu.edu ).
 
ProgramEval
CHM Program Evaluation -Continuous Monitoring of Small Groups Instruction: A Strategy for Monitoring and Maintaining Quality Educational Experiences
Small groups are frequently used in medical education as a way of engaging learners and personalizing their educational experience. Content varies across the necessary (basic, social and clinical) sciences; the duration of small groups ranges from weeks to years. Regardless, monitoring the process and learning environment within small groups is challenging. Course evaluations provide retrospective feedback; drop-in spot checks are resource intensive and often not representative because of observer effects.

In the new Shared Discovery Curriculum, our learning society small groups, called scholar groups--meet twice weekly from August through February; each two-hour session focuses on debriefing students' clinical experiences and working through modified PBL cases.
 
Given that this is a new curriculum, with faculty new to their roles as learning society scholar group leaders, we wanted an efficient strategy to obtain weekly small feedback to monitor group process, identify content issues and supplement our other information sources. 

After each small group, faculty were prompted via e-mail to complete a brief survey. Faculty are asked to rate the mood of the group on an 11-point scale (0= negative; 5=mixed; 10=positive) and to enter text describing the mood of the group. In addition, they were asked to comment on what worked well and what didn't work well in the modified PBL content. Two questions prompted if any students were late or missing from group, and an open text box was available for any additional comments.
 
Over the 21 weeks of the ECE phase of the new curriculum, 1145 surveys were completed; most faculty reported that the approach was convenient and efficient. The initial mean completion time was 6.0 minutes; at week 21 it was 5.0 minutes. The initial median completion time was 4.7 minutes and at week 21 was 2.1 minutes.

ECE Preceptor Rating

Faculty ratings of group mood ranged from 3 to 10, and the weekly average varied from 7.0 to 8.7 over 22 weeks. The figure above shows the weekly ratings by learning society. Content analysis of the mood descriptors favored positive adjectives related to positive attitude and engagement; negative adjectives reflected students' confusion, helplessness or fears. The weekly proportion of positive adjectives ranged from 90% to 58% over 22 weeks. The questions about the PBL content provided useful feedback to the curriculum designers.

This approach to monitoring small group process is feasible: most faculty regularly completed the surveys, many in less than four minutes. Their responses provided a quick weekly sampling across all 24 small groups and their 48 small group meetings each week. The insights are more representative of all groups and more immediate in terms of achievements and challenges related to process and content. This approach complements observational and student survey strategies.
 
These data are limited to the faculty members' perspectives of group process, which might not always correspond to students' perspectives. Once during fall semester we implemented a parallel brief survey for the medical students. We had sufficient data to compare the ratings for 19 of the 24 small groups: for 8 groups the faculty and students agreed within 1 point of the ratings of the mood of their small group. In five groups the faculty ratings were greater than those of the students, and in six groups, students rated the mood higher than the faculty.
 
There is a need to follow-up with faculty who stretch the limits of brevity in their responses, or who tend to ignore the request to complete the survey. This approach can be implemented with minimal staff time and resources to yield rich data; the benefits far outweigh the resources needed to implement.
hotoffpress
Hot Off the Press
- Phillips JA, Wendling AS, Fahey C & Mavis B. The impact of community-based undergraduate medical education on the regional physician workforce. Academic Medicine. Abstract published in Academic Medicine. 2016; 91(11) Suppl: S15.

- Joy de Vries-Erich, Kirsten Reuchlin, Paul de Maaijer & J. M. Monica van de Ridder (2017) Identifying facilitators and barriers for implementation of interprofessional education:Perspectives from medical educators in the Netherlands, Journal of Interprofessional Care, 31:2,170-174, DOI: 10.1080/13561820.2016.1261099

resources
OMERAD Resources
An interactive gallery featuring examples of CHM blended and online learning projects by B-CLR.
 
Resources are arranged by topic, addressing issues common to educational scholarship, including definitions of scholarship, formulating resource questions, methodology and research design as well as dissemination via poster or publication. 
   
DR-ED 
A medical education listserv maintained by OMERAD.
 
Peer-reviewed international open access journal for disseminating information on the education and training of physicians and other health care professionals.
 
Click on the link to view past issues of our newsletter.


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