The Competition

We're counting votes! We'll announce the winners of the 2012 Learning Competition on May 24, 2012.

CE At Your Fingertips: Crowdsourced Continuing Education Calendar and Tracking Tool for Transfusion Technologists

52 votes
Project Plan
What if you had a customised CE calendar, automatically populated by the global transfusion 'conscience' at your fingertips? This is a crowd sourced CE site designed to be a calendaring and tracking tool for CE events on a local, provincial, national, and international scale. Transfusion techs can have an ongoing centralised CE calendar that is populated by a larger transfusion 'conscience' (the crowd). A technologist could create a profile which would allow themselves to be tagged according to interests, institution, accrediting body, etc. The site would then be populated with CE events through e-mails or iCalendar events sent to it and a custom CE calendar would be created with events and event details (costs, webinar links, dial-in numbers, etc.) that would suit the tech's interests, deficiencies, and other profile details. The technologist could also track the events that they attended. Possible integration with smartphones and devices would be future goals. Overall, it would be a rich, always current, and scalable resource for people looking to track and share their current and future CE events. ***(The original idea needed to be modified due to feedback from judging panel. We much appreciate their insights and have modified the project.)****
Project goals: 
Create a crowdsourced continuing education calendar for transfusion technologists
Create a repository and tracking/documentation system for past and current continuing education credits
Experiment with and make use of available social media technologies to enhance transfusion education
Ensure a secure area for the profile to reside
Create a scalable architecture that would be sustainable to operate
Collaborators
Name / Group: 
Don Doiron
Stephanie Watson
Representative at the NS College of MLTs
Representative at NSPBCP
Other representatives of other Colleges/technologists as needed
Institution/Organization: 
Capital District Health Authority
Nova Scotia College of Medical Laboratory Technologists
Provincial Blood Coordinating Program (NS)
Others as needed.
Scope
How many MLTs will benefit?: 
1000+
Where will it have the most impact?: 
All of Canada
Regional details: 
Initially, we will trial it in Nova Scotia and roll it out to other provinces thereafter.
Approach
Type of learning: 
Informal learning
Type of expertise: 
Technical & Scientific skills
Scheduling
When can your project start?: 
Tue, 2012-09-04
How long will your project take to complete?: 
6-12 Months
Milestones
Milestone: 
Obtain webspace (URL and host)
Design and implement database model
Design and implement user interface
Determine permission levels for various profiles
Set up process to handle e-mail feeds and ics files
Liaise with appropriate user groups (alpha test)
User acceptance testing (UAT)
Beta testing on a limited scope
Roll-out to province (NS)
Start Date: 
Tue, 2012-09-04
Tue, 2012-09-04
Tue, 2012-09-04
Tue, 2012-12-11
Mon, 2013-01-14
Tue, 2012-09-04
Mon, 2013-05-13
Mon, 2013-06-10
Wed, 2013-07-03
Duration: 
1
14
28
16
4
4
1
2
1
Units: 
weeks
Budget
Requested budget range: 
Large ($15k to 25k)
Can you start your project any time?: 
Yes, it is ready to go
Budget details
Budget amount: 
20000.00
5000.00
How it will be used : 
To hire staff and consultants for development of database model, user interface, calendaring functionality
To hire staff and consultants to run the testing, user liaison, administration, roll-out and advertising
Staff / Volunteers
No. of people: 
3
2
10
Responsibility: 
User interface development and implementation
Database model development and implementation
System testing

Comments

Crowdsourcing

I think that you have adapted this project plan to be much more achievable. Dissemination of information about educational events can occur haphazardly so having a single updated calendar which the technologist could access to see what is available would be great. The challenge will of course be maintaining the calendar.
picture of bemused

CE education at your fingertips

Improving accessibility to educational information is a good thing. Pardon my ignorance with social media, but would this be a passive method of gleaning information? In other words, just watching/reading something? Would there be any problem solving, quizzes or assignments? Group work or learning opportunities? Kudos to you for capitalizing on technology.

Denise Evanovitch

reply to your comment

Denise, thank you for your question. Social media is not the end, but a means to the end. The social media concept of "the crowd" will be a method by which the calendar will be populated. The calendar does not replace the actual learning that you would do, but it's role would be to help you gather all of the possibilities that you can learn from. Your calendar would be a listing of all of the possible continuing education events that would be customized for you according to your profile. Of course, these are links or notifications of events and would actually contain the content itself. So, we would not be a repository for all of the various opportunities that you listed above, we would serve as the broker for you to know that those events actually existed. We would bridge you and the educational events together there, but be powered by the transfusion 'crowd'(a social media term) and its knowledge.

input from the judges

I am happy to hear about the good advice the judges gave offered. In fact I've heard this from a couple of finalists. What was the feedback that encouraged you to modify the original idea? What were the changes you've made?

~~~

Shanta Rohse, M. Ed.

~Your friendly BloodTechNet admin
info@bloodtechnet.ca

picture of shanta

re: Input from the judges

Shanta, Thank you for your question. First of all, the judges mentioned that they did like the innovative idea of exploring learning through social media, and that this had never been explored in transfusion medicine. One big thing that came up in multiple feedback comments was the question about sustainability, and how the site would be maintained. These two issues got me thinking about an even bigger issue that technologists face these days. What is that issue? Well, the reality is that healthcare budgets are contracting and continuing education is becoming harder and harder to achieve. Although the question bank is one possible way of allowing people to learn, it is still very limited because it only sources content from mostly Canadian participants, and requires multiple layers of checks and balances. Similarly, there would have to be a continuous refreshment of any concepts, especially if the transfusion thinking was to change over time, and it was not my intention to have a single source of information possibly dominate, as concepts can go stale but also regional variations can potentially dominate the discussion. Therefore, we have entirely dispensed with the question/case bank idea, but have kept the concept of using crowdsourcing and social media in terms of continuing education of technologists. So, after a lot of thinking and discussion with technologist staff, I discovered an even bigger issue was that really good continuing education opportunities were not being disseminated between the technologists in a systematic way. That is, if one technologist knew of, or was going to a continuing education session, it wasn't necessarily true that another technologist would know about it so that they could attend the same session. You would know about it either as a poster, random e-mail, word of mouth, or you may not even find out about it at all. In addition, technologists in smaller centers may not have an opportunity to participate in these sessions, or might not even know about them due to geographical or relative clinical isolation. This problem of knowing what's out there in terms of continuing education opportunities can be solved very well with social media techniques. That is where the idea of the ever evolving continuing education crowd sourced calendar came from. The vision would be that a technologist in any province at any time (day or night, shift or off shift) could have access to a calendar of continuing education opportunities. For instance, I would be able to patch into continuing education offered anywhere in the world provided that I knew about it, and that it was available for me to participate in. This calendar would allow a centralized destination for all of those events to be disseminated to the technologists. It would be sustainable, scalable, and would expand the technologists continuing education universe. We would act as the bridgebuilder between the continuing education event and the individual technologist. Just imagine being able to listen to a transfusion webinar from the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Singapore while you are having lunch just because you knew about it.

database, personal data and social media

Hi Calvino, Some questions for you: 1) What kind of database will you be using to manage the calendar? 2) What kind of data will you be collecting from participants in order to self-populate the events in the calendar? 3) How will you be integrating social media with the calendar?

~~~

Shanta Rohse, M. Ed.

~Your friendly BloodTechNet admin
info@bloodtechnet.ca

picture of shanta

database, personal data and social media

1. We would be using a flavor of an SQL database (MySQL, postgresSQL, etc.). Depending on the various calendaring tools/APIs out there, likely have to adapt them for use in this application. 2. We will need to collect enough data to create a profile for the participant. This information would be stored securely on the server. It would be similar to setting up a profile for registration at your local college. You would also select from a universe of tags that allow you to identify your interests. That would essentially make up your profile. 3. The social media integration could take place in various ways. Multiple solutions could include using a Google login or Facebook login. Overall, the social media aspect would be illustrated in how the events populate the calendar through crowd sourcing. Hopefully, this answers your questions.