Mark your calendars for this half day (8:30-12:30) IP Faculty Development event. You will have an opportunity to work with other teachers to develop interprofessional cases for your own and future collaborative teaching. There will be a portion of the time devoted to free development using the LTWC online tools (with technical and pedagogical assistance available). Contact the Faculty Development office for more information. Registration is limited.

Queen's team wins 1st annual Provincial Health Care Team Challenge - March 12, 2010
A team of Queen’s students from six different professional programs won the first annual Provincial Health Care Team Challenge (HCTC) on March 12, 2010 at the National Health Sciences Students’ Association conference in Hamilton. This was an interprofessional competition with five student teams developing and presenting a collaborative plan of care for a virtual patient. Representing Queen’s were: Justin Brooks (School of Rehabilitation Therapy, Physiotherapy), Karan Cheema (School of Nursing), Fateme Salehi (School of Medicine), Sylvia Magrys (School of Psychology), their faculty mentor, Anne O’Riordan (Office of Interprofessional Education and Practice), Ralph Yeung (School of X-Ray Technology), and Krista Sawadski (School of Rehabilitation Therapy, Occupational Therapy).  They competed against teams from the University of Toronto, McMaster University, the University of Western Ontario/Fanshawe College, and the University of Ottawa. The students were supported in this competition by their respective programs at Queen’s, the Office of Interprofessional Education and Practice (OIPEP), the Queen's Health Sciences Student's Association (QHSSA), and the Queen’s Bookstore.

Poster accepted at Emerging Technologies for Online Learning (San Jose, July 2010)
Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, a joint Symposium of Sloan Consortium and MERLOT with MoodleMoot, is designed to bring together individuals interested in the technological aspects of online learning.  The symposium, focusing on the technologies that drive online learning effectiveness, will continue to highlight research, applications, and best practices of important emerging technological tools. 

Entrada: facilitating a competency-based medical curriculum using an open source integrated teaching and learning system (L. Davidson, M. Simpson, L. Tomalty)
Virtually all medical schools utilize some form of learning management system to deliver schedules and curricular content to their students, but these systems are often in private instances that do not facilitate the collaborative, humanities or leadership aspects of medical education. Over the past five years, the Queen's University Medical Education Technology Unit (MEdTech) in collaboration with University of Calgary, Office of Undergraduate Medical Education has developed a novel and customizable integrated teaching and learning system called Entrada. In addition to curriculum and schedule management, Entrada incorporates social networking features that allow users to create and direct interactive communities for a wide range of activities, including over 200 such groups on interprofessional discussion, small group cases, student governance, and online learning modules across the two schools. Recently launched in the Schools of Rehabilitation Therapy and Nursing at Queens', Entrada can also be used to facilitate Interprofessional Education (IPE) by creating both communal and distinct virtual learning spaces for students enrolled in different programs. Newly released and upcoming features permit students and faculty to author and share quizzes, online cases, virtual patients, and aggregate library resources to support learning. Through these many features, Entrada supports faculty instruction, and students' negotiation, of the complex information spaces, particularly in humanities-based topics, not typicallysupported by traditional learning management systems. Additionally, through the collaborative nature of the project, Entrada has created a culture of leadership in conceptualizing and realizing eLearning projects among IT groups. With the open source release (May 2010), Entrada exemplifies leadership through sharing code with a world-wide audience for the improvement of medical education through strong technological resourcing and collaborative programming.

Poster accepted CCME/AFMC conference, May 2010
Our group's poster has been accepted for presentation at  the 2010 Canadian Conference on Medical Education (St. John’s,NL) May 1-5, 2010

Rich Environments for Active Interprofessional Learning: Learning Together with Cases
Provincial and federal initiatives are promoting Interprofessional education (IPE) for health professionals, however, few institutions have access to standard, evidence-linked, IPE curricular content (CIHR, 2008). The ‘Rich Environments for Learning' (REAL) project uses technology to simulates Interprofessional practice while providing an opportunity to facilitate the development of core Interprofessional competencies in pre-licensure health professional students. The goal of the project is to design, develop, implement and assess a technology-facilitated learning experience designed to prepare health professional students for functional collaborative practice situations. We have developed a series of authentic web-based patient stories that are adaptable to a variety of educational contexts and settings. Prelicensure students from Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Nursing, Medicine work to explore cases, develop common resources and complete related tasks using both interactive web-based collaborative tools as well as face-to-face sessions. The patient stories that we have developed are multi-layered enabling students to learn both discipline-specific content as well as common IP competencies. An ‘Educational Management Action Research' approach (McPherson and Nunes, 2004) has been used to evaluate the implementation of the project, with particular focus on authenticity and usability of the cases and web-interfaces as well as planned adoption by educational leaders.