ATS has just begun an exciting project with MD Anderson's Hematology Oncology Fellowship Program. When we met with Dr. Robert Wolff, Dr. Ahmed Eid and other program leaders a few weeks ago, their initial questions centered around Sakai as a repository for educational resources. But this group has a passion for education and the discussion quickly became a lively exchange of ideas for ways that the Program could put educational technology to work for them, including instructional design consultation, the Camtasia Relay lecture capture tool and Sakai.  

Fellows participate in a structured program of face-to-face experiences including clinical work, case presentations and didactic learning. Another key emphasis is board review. ATS is working with the program leaders to identify how technology can support their goals and also capture elements of the program that are literally too good to miss. 

I witnessed one example of this during a recent visit to the LBJ site. Dr. Martin Raber and Dr. Eid engaged the fellows in a discussion of everything from treatment strategies to professional ethics to burnout among oncologists. Dr. Eid and his team know there's no substitute for being there, but they hope to make those experiences less ephemeral and share the learning with those that can't be there in person. Their approach is scientific, with a strong interest in also using the technology tools to measure effectiveness and learning outcomes.  

We are just getting started - but it's already too much fun to call it work.

Stay tuned.

I had the opportunity to visit our colleagues at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland recently.  We compared notes on how we use and support the institutions' course management systems, which happens to be Sakai for both of us.

OHSU's Academic Technology group fields basic technical issues (log in problems, etc.) via phone and email, as we do. All OHSU Acad Tech team members, including their leader, director Dr. Tom Boudrot, cover the helpline and inbox during the day, and all take turns carrying a pager so they can offer extended hours, 7 days a week. 

OHSU defers the heavy lifting on technical matters to a third party. This allows their team to focus on working with faculty members to build instructionally-sound courses.The scope of our technical support is much broader.

The fact that everyone on the OHSU team, including the hard-core technical guy is an experienced educator lends a decidedly different feel to their support model. The focus is more on using technology to support instructional design instead of system maintenance.

The common element between OHSU's Academic Technology group and our Academic Technology Services group is the emphasis on providing excellent customer service. Tom's comments on the importance of meeting their customers' needs could easily have come from one of our team meetings.

If you're interested in more about IT customer service, you'll want to view Gary Kidney's slides, "Understanding Users and Transforming IT to Deliver."   

Pictured above: Mountain stream just outside Portland, Oregon

A hot topic at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium in July was the increasing need to develop taxonomies for educational content. As one speaker pointed out, the challenge of today's world is not a lack of information. It is everywhere, it is freely available and even the person who decries YouTube the loudest has used it to demonstrate something at least once. 

The true challenge is organizing the information into a meaningful, useful and identifiable form. This is where taxonomies become critical. Metadata can tag the information but who decides what the tags will be and which associations are appropriate? Educational taxonomies must go a step further and decide how the bit of content might be used to support learning.

The presenters at the Symposium offered this as an ongoing challenge rather than an issue with a solution. Read more about taxonomies for educational media and implications for the semantic web.