Category: Elearning

TinCan projects underway at UMHS

I work for the University of Michigan Health System, on the Learning Management Team. We run the enterprise LMS, create online learning activities for use across UMHS, and offer innovative solutions and training for educators embedded throughout the system.

Back in 2008, I attended a SCORM 2.0 requirements gathering workshop hosted by LETSI in Pensacola. My participation was driven by the hope we could improve SCORM and maybe move it toward some of the capabilities that we particularly wanted:

  • Make the LMS disappear from the user’s view where it wasn’t absolutely needed, yet track everything that needs to be tracked.
  • Open up the data inside the LMS to any application that needed to consume it using standards, so this wouldn’t be a custom project for every application.
  • Track and use demographic, role and other types of non-SCORM data for consumption by adaptive learning applications.
  • Eliminate technical limitations of SCORM, including cross-domain issues, the requirement for an open SCORM session to be present before communication could occur, and allow third party participation in tracking for use cases like mentoring and checklist-driven demos.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, we finally got the chance to unwrap our shiny new LRS and try it out! An xAPI LRS came with the Rustici SCORM Engine we integrated with our LMS. This was very exciting for us, since we had lots of ideas that could now be tested.

Unfortunately, experimentation with new technologies is challenging in our production environment due to high-availability requirements and clinical dependencies on the LMS, so we installed the LRS in a test environment instead, and started to build prototype xAPI projects.  We are currently in the process of implementing a stand-alone LRS in its own production environment, and that will enable the real pilots to begin without affecting the LMS.

Projects we are working on tend to fall into two categories: ones that involve the Learning Management System and ones that don’t. I think xAPI projects that involve integration with the LMS are only really interesting where xAPI can solve a technical problem or provide an LMS-related use-case that SCORM or AICC cannot fulfill. If it’s already working well, why fix it? Over the last few years, LMS’s have developed workarounds for some of the technical limitations of SCORM on their own, albeit in a non-standards sort of way, so the case for a LMS/LRS integration is somewhat diminished, but it is still worth doing, if only because it is a STANDARD.

However, the typical LMS is not truly an all-encompassing learning universe and there isn’t really a compelling reason to make it that. xAPI has quite a self-standing role to play. We need to bring the tracking to where people learn, not hope that people will come to where the tracking is for their not-explicitly-required learning. Truly, the use of the word “tracking” when used with xAPI is misleading –  since some of the best uses for xAPI have absolutely nothing to do with tracking completions and scores.

We may want to aggregate results, but it is not clear that the LMS will be the best place to do that after a while, since its data is a subset of the kind of data that could be collected with xAPI.

The reality is that people that have a choice will never go to the LMS for all of their learning, and especially not their “real” learning, no matter what LMS vendors would like us to believe, and despite vendor attempts at providing social learning and communities within Learning Management Systems.  But there are plenty of reasons for exposing, analyzing, or otherwise “tracking” some of that currently invisible learning in ways that don’t involve the LMS at all.

In case anyone is interested in getting our code, or taking projects further than we are able to at the moment,  some of the projects our team has worked on are listed below. 

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HTML 5 Treasure Hunt game framework

I’m working on an HTML version of a Flash Treasure Hunt training game I built a couple of years ago. When it’s done, this will be more of a flexible framework than a specific game, capable of being used for any of the many situations in healthcare that require finding the right tool, part or medication quickly and accurately. Searchable anesthesia carts, cardiac arrest team “crash carts”, cardiac catheterization tubing racks, operating rooms, and even patient rooms are just some of the possible settings that could be portrayed in the game.

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Easy, trackable WordPress elearning with Gravity Forms quizzes and the TinCanAPI

I work in a small learning management department in a large Health System. One of the “forever” problems we’d like to solve, is how to get out of the way of our many clinical subject matter experts and make it EASY for them to put trackable learning content online by themselves. Why is this still a problem in this age of online applications? Simply put: cost, learning curve and trackability.

Licensing costs in a decentralized environment
Software license costs are a big issue in a distributed authoring environment, particularly for departments that watch every penny. There are hundreds of potential authors out there, mostly in departments that do not prioritize the purchase of elearning software. Licenses for the big elearning software packages (Articulate, Storyline, Lectora, etc.) are not inexpensive, even with academic discounts and whatever site-licenses may exist.

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The future Healthcare Learning Landscape – a 10,000 foot view

The field of Healthcare today is filled with opportunities for improvement. Inconsistent treatment, preventable illness, and medical errors that result in injury are all too common, along with enormous inefficiency and waste.

The Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is leading an initiative that descibes a better organizing principle for healthcare – a “Learning Healthcare System.” A learning healthcare system is simply one that continuously “Learns,” meaning that healthcare data from many sources, including electronic medical records is turned into guidelines and knowledge and that knowledge is swiftly translated into practice so that all clinical decisions and processes are based on the best available and most current evidence. New knowledge is in turn generated in the course of practice, and the cycle continues, fostering continuous improvement at all levels: national, organizational, unit, team and individual.

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