Blog

2022 WGEA CRIME Unconference

CRIME members gathered for an un-conference on Thursday afternoon as a pre-conference before the Friday morning start of the 2022 Western Group on Educational Affairs conference hosted in Portland, OR by Oregon Health Sciences University. Representatives from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Stanford University, UCSF-Fresno, University of Nevada – Reno, University of Washington, and Kaiser Permanente Medical School shared successes from the past year and posed questions to the group in areas of curiosity or concern. The unconference activity revealed several themes to explore over the afternoon. 

To start, each school diagrammed their structures of technology support. The organizational structures illustrated a great diversity of approaches to supporting MD students and curricula. Additionally, the diagrams reveal the range of organization of the academic medical centers.

Stanford

Stanford Medicine EdTech is a part of the IT organization supporting both the SoM and the health care system. EdTech reports up through the health care system organizational structure. We have a director and three teams, each with a manager, covering the services in the clouds at the bottom of our chart. We collaborate with many other teams indicated by the dotted line relationships listed on both sides. In addition we also have a project manager who reports to the IT Project Management Office, but whose primary client is EdTech.

UCSF-Fresno

The UCSF Fresno is a Regional campus of UCSF main campus. Our program The San Joaquin Valley PRIME (Program In Medical Education) is housed within the UME
department of UCSF Fresno. We have a local IT department that helps us with various IT needs, such as any classroom help, anydesktop equipment and/or issues, any AV needs, and with any special projects we need. Our
IT Systems Admin Manager stays connected with Chandler Mayfield to ensure we are up to date and connected with main campus.
We are extremely lucky to have such a great team upstairs to help with our Med Ed Tech needs. We do still utilize UCSF main campus IT Services serves for the following applications, UCSF emails, and anything on MyAccess: HBS, Ilios, CLE, BearBuy, MyExpense, Smartsheet,
People Connect, etc.

University of Nevada – Reno

Organizational Sketch of CRIME at University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine (One person’s perspective. KCF 20220404 1720)

1- First there are Learners.

Everything supports that. In light blue from left to right, Campus provides rooms (lecture halls, small group rooms and an anatomy laboratory) and Campus IT provides ethernet worked facilities, lecterns and projection equipment [think infrastructure and hardware]; the Office for Medical Education [think program and scheduling and software support] provides quiz software Canvas scheduling and materials distribution and personnel (teachers) deployment and lastly the Office for Faculty provides emotional and intellectual support to the personnel [think about instructional design support for faculty and P&T support here].

2- Student Affairs supports students’ bodies and emotional aspects. Separately, the Library supports their learning machines and some of their external learning resources [Osmosis, Sketchy]).

3- Our office for Continuous Institutional Advancement handles accreditation, some aspects of student organizational evaluation (GQ, Y2Q, ISS) and data governance.

4- Both our Office for DEI and down-campus support our diverse and inclusive climate. 5- All of this sits upon the teaching hospital learning environment, Renown Health system (they have their own IT support and physical culture support systems (EPIC). The dotted line around Renown indicates a brand new and complex relationship.

University of Washington

The UWSOM Academic & Learning Technologies department in Seattle supports technology use for medical student education and includes four teams: web platforms, media production and delivery, data, and instructional design. We report up to the Vice Dean for Academic, Rural, and Regional Affairs, with a dotted line relationship to the SOM-IT department. We operate in tight collaboration with the schools Curriculum and Assessment teams, while also working with and relying on multiple other parts of the organization within and outside of the SOM, including the Department of Faculty Affairs and the Health Sciences Classroom Support group, which oversees classroom AV in shared spaces across the different health professions programs. We also work with faculty, administrators, and operational support teams at each of the five other WWAMI Foundations Curriculum sites in Spokane WA, Laramie WY, Anchorage AK, Bozeman MT, and Moscow ID, providing technology training, consultation, and support for certain shared processes and platforms, as well as for many operational and teaching activities across this five state region.

University of Colorado

The MD program has layers of technology support. Campus-wide the Office of Information Technology supports the infrastructure and enterprise systems. The School of Medicine Information Services provides desktop support for the administrative staff, supports the applications of the MD program and has recently added project managers to aid in the implementation of new systems and new curriculum. Within the Office of Medical Education, directors of curriculum and ed tech and instructional design implement and train on the software and systems of curriculum delivery and evaluation and student assessment. This onion of support works with dedicated people at every level who seek out areas for improvement and are open to communication across the institution. 

Congratulations to our 2021 CRIME Poster Award winners!

One of CRIME’s offerings to the WGEA community is the annual CRIME Poster awards given at the Spring meeting.  Our winners walk away with a cash prize, but most importantly with the knowledge that CRIME does pay, that they are officially partners in CRIME, and that they’ll forevermore be a part of the CRIME scene.

This year we had:

  • 6 CRIME members judging
  • 10 posters identified as involving an educational technology
  • 3 posters chosen for the award, showing excellence in the application of technology to medical education

And with no further ado, the 2021 WGEA CRIME Poster Award Winners are:

Art in Anatomy: Templates to Facilitate Interactive and Visual Learning with New Technologies

Sumana Mahata, Paul Kingston, Mark Whitehead, Katharina Brandl, Geoffroy Noel, Lina Lander (UC San Diego School of Medicine)

Reviewer comment: “I was impressed to see data supporting what seems like a deceptively simple and straightforward concept. Providing some basic anatomy study templates in a digital format has immediate application for student study usage and allows for a combination of kinetic and intellectual learning support. The information was beautifully presented and discussed.”

Medical Education Media Enlivened with Character Animator

Lauren Watley (Stanford Medicine)

Reviewer comment: “This poster demonstrates the use of animation techniques that we haven’t seen much of in medical education. It highlights the workflow and collaboration that the Stanford production team has implemented to integrate storytelling and artistic design to illustrate depth in an array medical education topics. The author was able to share something complex with novices and clearly communicate the utility in med ed.”

Starting medical school remotely: the good, the bad, and the zoom fatigue

Marieke Kruidering, Rupa Tuan, Barbie Klein, Chantilly Apollon, Derek Harmon, Christian Burke (UCSF School of Medicine)

Reviewer comment: “The content was well-organized and I was able to get a clear vision of the effort to take an anatomy course remote. This was an excellent poster on learning outcomes and student satisfaction during remote teaching.”

New CRIME Boss In Town!

Dear Criminals,

With cocktails and happy trails, tonight I handed over the CRIME Boss reins to Helen Macfarlane during the annual CRIME Dinner. It was held virtually this year, but was just as much fun. Over dinner and drinks, we regaled each other with memories from previous WGEAs and CRIME dinners (who else remembers the roof meat in Tucson in 2017?). Conversation was accompanied by much laughter. We got to see a couple little ones on camera too and we are grateful that their parents indulged us during family time.

While the final votes rolled in, we got to hear from our two CRIME Boss-elect candidates about why they hoped to be CRIME Boss some day. It was heartwarming to hear them both call out the desire to maintain the sense of community and our valued CRIME traditions. Speaking of traditions, this year, we couldn’t vote on real cocktail napkins, but Helen whipped up these brilliant virtual ones for us!

At 6:00pm we closed the voting and announced that our new CRIME Boss-elect is Jason Reep from University of Washington! Congratulations Jason!! To celebrate, we played a side splitting game of Broken Picture Phone. Download the below for our books. Honestly there are some must-reads. How did we get from “100 years of solitude” to “running across America”?

The past two years as CRIME Boss have been a whirlwind. Our lives and jobs are so much different now than they were when I started Bossing in Reno, Nevada at WGEA 2019. But through it all, we criminals continue to innovate and support the technology building blocks of our curriculums. It has been a joy to serve the CRIME community, first with Julie Youm as CRIME Boss-elect and then with Helen Macfarlane as CRIME Boss. I have learned so much and I have each and every one of you to thank for that. I know I leave CRIME in excellent hands with Helen and Jason. I may be riding off into the sunset, but the sunrise is just around the bend and who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Yee haw y’all! Happy trails!

Pauline Becker
Stanford Medicine

PS – Now go water the grass! But watch out for the weather in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch!

CRIME Meeting @ GEA 2021

This morning we had 9 partners in CRIME representing 5 schools join for the CRIME meeting to kick off the 2021 Virtual GEA Joint Regional Conference. Schools in attendance were:

  1. Stanford Medicine
  2. UCLA
  3. UW
  4. UC Irvine
  5. University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine

Major themes discussed were:

  • preparing for heading back to the classroom
    • upgrading spaces in preparation for hyflex instruction
  • curriculum reform and EdTech/ITs role at the table
  • creation of faculty development “playbooks” for increasing student engagement
  • the importance of the art of storytelling for medical education
  • open positions including a director, instructional designers and a data developer
  • data management and aggregation systems for dashboards including:
    • ProgressIQ
    • Elentra

For all the details please see the meeting minutes or access the meeting recording.

CRIME Field Trip – GEA 2021

On Monday April 19, 2021 we hosted this one-of-a-kind pre-conference event. Unable to go to corporate offices, museums or the theater, for this year’s field trip, we brought them to us. We had over 50 participants join, including folks from CRIME, GIR, GEA conference attendees, medical education and community members. If you missed it, links to the video and chat from the two sessions are included in the agenda below. In addition here are the host slides.

First (left), Tain Barzso, Product Lead for Education at Zoom talked to us about:

  • Zoom’s growth when the pandemic hit
  • Highlighting Zoom features important for education
  • How Zoom supports privacy
  • A sneak peek at what might be coming
  • Suggestions for how Zoom can be used in a hyflex environment
  • Exemplars of how Zoom functionality has been stretched by universities

Second (below), we had a panel of educators, scholars and leaders from the disciplines of music, yoga, science and theater arts talk to us about how they pivoted to delivering their content remotely. Common themes emerged about reaching a wider audience, compromise, iteration and silver linings.

Agenda and Speaker List

______________________________
9:00am
Zoom For Educationvideo, chat
Tain Barzso, he/him
Product Lead for Education, Zoom
At Zoom, Tain builds teams and connects strategic dots across product, IT, and engineering to optimize Zoom for K-12, higher education and enterprise/continued learning – working to build a platform for the future of hybrid and remote learning and engagement. As previous manager of AV Tech at Stanford Medicine, Tain understands and can speak to the unique challenges of hybrid and remote learning in medical education.
______________________________
10:00am
Coffee Break
______________________________
10:15am
How We Did Itvideo, chat
A panel of representatives from education and education-adjacent organizations share how they pivoted to delivering their content remotely.
Heather Anne Tinling, she/they
Owner, Siren Song Enterprises
Offering voice lessons, yoga, and teaching space, Heather Anne is a dynamic instructor and performer who walks the fine line between singer and actress. More than two decades of performance experience and over a decade of teaching informs a style rooted in support and compassion. Heather is a graduate of SFSU with a Bachelors in Drama and a Bachelors in Music and is an RYT 200hr Certified Yoga Teacher.
Zeke Kossover, he/him
Leadership Program Co-Leader, Exploratorium Teacher Institute
Zeke trains and supports coaches and mentors who work with novice science teachers in their first two years in the classroom. He has taught high school science for 21 years, worked as a science advisor for both NBC Learn and Discovery Digital and has worked with Congress and the White House in his role as Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the National Science Foundation. He believes that science education starts when students construct their own understanding of the world.
Katy Scott, she/her
STEM Integration Manager, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Katy Scott works to integrate STEM and environmental education at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Impacting 85,000 students and 1,000 teachers every year, the Aquarium’s education programs influence how science and conservation are taught throughout California, with a focus on project-based learning, student agency, equity, and maker education. A former public school teacher, Katy also provides professional development for teachers at area public school districts and volunteers as a Girl Scout troop leader.
Joy Meads, she/her
Director of Dramaturgy and New Works, American Conservatory Theater
Joy Meads is Director of Dramaturgy and New Works at American Conservatory Theater. Previously, Meads was Literary Manager/Artistic Engagement Strategist at Center Theatre Group, Literary Manager at Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Associate Artistic Director at California Shakespeare Theater. Meads has also developed plays with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, NYTW, Berkeley Rep, Denver Center, the O’Neill, among others. Meads is a co-founder of The Kilroys. Called “the superheroines of the theater” by Backstage, The Kilroys are a gang of playwrights and dramaturgs working for gender equity on American stages.
______________________________
11:45am
END

CRIME Accomplishments for 2020

Presentations and workshops

AAMC Learn Serve Lead November 2019 Technology Trends in Medical Education: Capabilities and Crucial Considerations for 2030Pauline Becker, facilitator of panel discussion

AAMC Medbiquitous 2020 workshop Community Action Planning for Educational Technology Interoperability in Health Professions – Sponsored by MedBiquitous in collaboration with WGEA CRIMELeadership team included Pauline Becker, Julie Youm, Scott Helf and Helen Macfarlane from the western region. https://medbiq.org/capetihp Pauline Becker, Julie Youm and Helen Macfarlane will continue this work to build community and accomplish shared goals across the United States and Europe in health professions schools. 

CRIME/GIR Ed Tech working group AAMC – co-chair Julie Youm is from the western region, CRIME boss and CRIME Boss-elect are active participants. Early in the pandemic the GIR Ed Tech Working Group was meeting weekly to share ideas and collaboratively solve the problems of sudden remote curriculum delivery. 

Group on Information Resources, EduTech Working Group December 2020 meeting, Community Action Planning for Educational Technology Interoperability in Health Professions workshop with Pauline Becker, Helen Macfarlane and Julie Youm. This workshop continued the work start at the AAMC Medbiquitous workshop.

CRIME Community Round-up scheduled adjacent to AAMC Learn Serve Lead 2020. 19 attendees represented 11 of the 15 active schools in the WGEA. This online gathering provided networking and knowledge sharing to those attending.

CRIME Expedition: Virtual Gathering Spaces, in December seven members of CRIME explored two online gathering spaces, Gather and Nooks. Together they  learned about the spaces and documented strengths and weaknesses.

Planning for the combined spring AAMC Group on Education Affairs meeting in spring 2021.

Publication submission

Submission to Academic Medicine Last Page, Educational Technology Structures, Trends, & Metrics, authors include Pauline Becker and Helen Macfarlane. 

Blog posts

Resources for Planning a Virtual Meeting, Pauline Becker 

CRIME Community Round-up @AAMC LSL 2020, Pauline Becker

MedBiquitous and CRIME Kick-off Community Action Planning for EdTech Interoperability, Pauline Becker

CRIME Expedition: Virtual Gathering Spaces, Pauline Becker

Annual Report for 2020, Helen Macfarlane

Online Networking

CRIME has an active Slack group with 105 members and close to 800 messages posted. 

The CRIME boss and CRIME boss-elect meet every other week, collaborating on projects and community building endeavors. 

CRIME Expedition: Virtual Gathering Spaces

Today seven criminals from five different schools met to take a look at two different virtual gathering platforms, Gather and Nooks. Both of these platforms aim to compensate for some of the ways that Zoom and WebEx fail when it comes to recreating a live event space virtually. Both tools provide free use for groups smaller than 20. Neither of them provided virtual video backgrounds which was a disappointment to some. We spent an hour together, with 30 minutes in each platform, enough time to get a feel for both. Thank you to all who attended:

  1. Helen Macfarlane, University of Colorado
  2. Irina Rusell, Stanford Medicine
  3. Jamie Riera, University of New Mexico
  4. Kay Monteith, UC Riverside
  5. Michael Campion, University of Washington
  6. Pauline Becker, Stanford Medicine
  7. Rosemary Tyrell , UC Riverside

Gather Overview

https://gather.town/

Gather take a very different approach from existing virtual meeting spaces. It takes the idea of physical proximity and translates it to virtual space. The interface is very game-like. You enter your gathering with an avatar that you can move with traditional game controls WASD. As you move around the virtual room and approach other avatars, you can hear and see their video. If you walk away from them, their audio and video fade out.

Gather spaces can be custom designed via their map builder, or they have a few pre-built maps you can draw from, including a “basic conference” which includes rooms for:

  • an expo hall,
  • a poster session,
  • a plenary hall,
  • a social/mixer space
  • and several breakout rooms or small meeting rooms.

Gather allows integration and interaction with online tools. When you enter a space, you can launch a Zoom session, pull up a .png image of a poster, play an online game, or share an online interactive whiteboard tool.

Gather also creates private spaces within a larger room through the use of rugs or other visual cues on the maps. In these private spaces you can only hear/see the video of people also in that space. This is very useful for poster sessions, where you can place a private space around each poster, allowing only in closest proximity to the poster to hear the presenter’s discussion. Other people walking in the aisles carry on conversations in a different virtual space even if they are in close proximity to, but not inside, the private space.

Finally, Gather has a robust chat feature and a set of clever people-finding features like being able to follow another avatar or being able to map a path to another avatar to find them and talk to them.

Nooks Overview

https://nooks.in/

Nooks is the next level of video conference interaction, raising the bar from Zoom and Webex. There are a range of event templates ranging from conference to classroom, that are ready to go once selected. These templates can be edited and added to as well.

One of the most unique features is “whisper,” which allows the user to virtually lean over and have a side conversation with another attendee. The two whispering are still able to hear the rest of the conversation but others cannot hear them whispering. There is a blur added to the video of those whispering which is seen by others in the room.

Nooks has a range of rooms with unique functions. Large rooms have a stage, which allows the person(s) on the stage to speak to everyone in the room. Within the larger rooms there can be breakout tables, where attendees are able to speak with each other and hear the person on the stage. One cannot hear attendees at other tables. Tables are limited to five people. There are also lounge areas which allow all attendees to speak to everyone in the lounge or whisper with a single person. The recreation area, The Oval, has poker built in.

It is straightforward to add tabs to rooms where links, slides, docs or sheets can be shared with attendees.

Nooks has a very easy to use quick-polls feature with thumbs up/down and a five point range which can be launched in two clicks.

The chat feature allows an attendee to chat with everyone, everyone in the room, everyone at the table or individuals. This is helpful but needed explanation for new users.

External apps can be integrated, we did not experiment with integrations. We did try out the whiteboard which was easy to use and has a cleaner interface than Gather’s.

We did discover that Firefox did not support all features. One attendee struggled upon entering, however the Helpbot was helpful and the issue (VPN) was overcome.

MedBiquitous and CRIME Kick-off Community Action Planning for EdTech Interoperability

In October, MedBiquitous, in collaboration with CRIME, hosted the workshop “Community Action Planning for Educational Technology Interoperability in Health Professions.” Participants were asked to apply and applications were curated to ensure we had representation from a diversity of viewpoints. Thirty-three (33) edtech community activists from five (5) different countries representing twenty-right (28) institutions attended. We engaged participants from academic medicine, the health professions, regulatory bodies, government and industry.

The workshop began with a brief overview of the topic, followed by two sets of facilitated break-out groups. The first break-out group served to collaboratively brainstorm pain points related to systems interoperability. The word cloud generated from an analysis of the text sends a clear message. “Vendors lack data standards.”

The pain points were grouped into themes, top priorities were voted on, and the 5 top pain point themes identified:

Top Five Themes:

  1. Vendor Relationships
  2. Data Standards & Common Vocabularies
  3. Leadership & Governance
  4. Data Capture & Aggregation
  5. Cost, Time & Efficiency

These five themes were then used to fuel the work of the second breakout, which delivered a detailed description of each problem and proposed actionable items to address it.

This workshop was ground-breaking in its use of four different platforms within the space of two hours:

PlatformUse
WebEx Trainingaudio, slide sharing, polling, breakout groups
Muralcollaborative brainstorming and prioritization by vote
Google Docscollaborative writing
txtfacilitator communication back-channel

The workshop website lists further information including the current set of deliverables (workshop presentations, pain point brainstorms and action plans) and will be the hub for communication of next steps. If you are interested in joining this effort, please contact medbiq@aamc.org.

CRIME Community Round-up @AAMC LSL 2020

Today CRIME held a networking meeting adjacent to AAMC’s virtual Learn Serve Lead 2020. Active CRIME members set to work a week ago recruiting representatives from schools who have been less active in the past year or two. There are 26 WGEA member schools. At the beginning of this effort, 6 Western region schools had active representation. Today there are 15 schools with active representation. A big THANK YOU to our CRIME reps that assisted with rounding up our community! We are very proud of this jump in participation. And a big WELCOME to our new members. We can’t wait to get to know you.

Total WGEA Member Schools26
2019 Active CRIME Schools623%
2020 Active CRIME Schools1540%

In today’s networking meeting, we had 19 people online representing 11 of the 15 active schools!

The agenda covered (1) a brief introduction to AAMC/GIR/WGEA/CRIME for new members and (2) updates from each school on their recent challenges, victories and major projects. The meeting brought into focus the fact that none of us are alone. We are facing the same set of difficulties and zeroing in on related solutions. The time is ripe for knowledge sharing and reaching out to colleagues to avoid duplicate efforts.

To learn more, here are the meeting minutes. And here is the meeting recording.

Resources for Planning A Virtual Conference

Many of us are needing to transition our in-person conferences and events to a virtual format.  Here are some resources providing guidance and tips.