Primarily Education-Focused Sessions and Resources

OLC – 8th Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning International Symposium 2015

Dates: April 22nd – April 24th

Conference Overview:

As emerging technologies continue to be embraced and are changing the way people socialize and learn, we are presented with new opportunities for leveraging emerging technology and pedagogy to shape the next generation of teaching and learning. But emerging technologies are reshaping more than pedagogy. Wearable technologies, analytics, an increased appreciation for openness, connected learning, global collaboration, social technologies and the increasing need to encourage experimentation in order to innovate are also impacting how we train, support, and incentivize faculty; design learning environments; and lead within a higher education organization.

The all-star line up of speakers for the Online Learning Consortium’s ET4Online 2015 will provide you with provocative and meaningful insight about how emerging technologies are impacting higher education and recontextualize our academic experiences within an agile, fluid world. UTHSC has a limited number of logins available for virtual attendee session access for sessions that will be streamed live from the conference site in Dallas, Texas. Virtual attendee access will allow you to view the live sessions from any location and will also provide access to the session recordings for one year.

A complete list of  sessions available to virtual attendees can be found at: http://olc.onlinelearningconsortium.org/conference/2015/et4online/streamed_sessions

Please contact Kristy Conger (kconger@uthsc.edu / 901-448-2253) to request virtual attendee access for an individual or a college/program/department. This is a great professional development opportunity for those who teach online or support online faculty.

Online Discussion: Practices to Boost Learning & Engagement (Magna Online 40-Minute Seminar)

Date: April 28, 2015
Time: 1:00 PM – 1:40 PM
Location: GEB A304

Presenter: Lolita Paff, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Business & Economics at Penn State Berks

Overview:

Online discussion is a great way for students to connect and learn. But you can’t just set up a board and leave it there. Students need responses to their work to keep growing and learning. An unmonitored discussion board can lead to huge headaches and not much learning. This means you need effective strategies to keep students on task and promote truly educational online interaction.

Online Discussion: Practices to Boost Learning & Engagement will show you how to coach students toward meaningful discussion. By the end of the seminar, you’ll have the insights and tools you need to:

•    Employ alternative strategies to promote interaction and develop students’ online discussion skills
•    Compare and apply different discussion board formats to increase student interest and engagement
•    Identify and manage techniques to empower students as facilitators of online discussion

To register to attend this session go to: http://bit.ly/1Gq6bD0

Professional Sessions

Biomedical Informatics Group (BIG) Meeting

Date: April 24, 2015
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Location: 910 Madison, Room 502

Presenter: Aman Patel, Sr. Bioinformatics Engineer for Computational Biology (St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital)

Topic: A Text mining talk: A Support Vector Machine-based Recommendation Classifier for Medical Content and Occupations

Overview:

With the rapid growth of online information, text classification has become a key technique for organizing and searching text data. A key part of the web is the recommendation engine, with which users browsing for content online are given recommendations based on their attributes and/or their past viewing history.

This talk serves as an introduction to textual data mining and the mathematical foundations behind various machine learning classifiers. We will use a real world data set of nearly 950 medical seminar documents to illustrate a method for building an automated content classifier for biomedical occupations. Performance results will also be shown with various experiments conducted to find the best combination of parameters that results in 90%+ accuracy among the trained automated classifier.

Mr. Patel currently works as Sr. Bioinformatics Engineer in Computational Biology department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Before this he was responsible for creating and managing Cure4Kids, and Pond4Kids projects at the Outreach department also at St. Jude. Cure4Kids is a web based collaboration platform for Pediatric Oncologists and other medical professionals, it hosts over 1400 medical seminars. Pond4kids is a free online EHR tool built for use by St. Jude partner hospitals around the world. It hosts over 200k medical records and is the central tool used by the IOP to gather patient data from partner hospitals. He currently hold a Masters and Bachelors of science degree in Computer Science.

Interprofessional Education Conference: Let’s Start Talking – The importance of interprofessional communication in improving patient outcomes and safety

Date: April 29, 2015
Time: 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: Freeman Auditorium – Hamilton Eye Institute

Overview:

The Interprofessional Education Conference organized by the HRSA Interprofessional Education Grant Team (UTHSC Colleges of Nursing and Dentistry) will examine the importance of interprofessional communication in improving patient outcomes and safety. The goal of IPE of health care providers is to provide evidence-based and comprehensive health care for diverse patient populations. Healthcare needs of patients often transcend the individual health care provider and encompass various roles played by an interprofessional team of health professionals.

Conference Objectives:

• Describe the potential impact of interprofessional communication on patient outcomes and safety
• Articulate the benefit of the use of technology in improving the communication among healthcare providers, patients, and/or caregivers
• Examine the characteristics of an effective team communication scenario

To register to attend this conference go to: https://2015ipeconference.eventbrite.com  (space is limited)

AIHC Leadership Webinar Series – Developing Interprofessional Champions in the Clinical Environment: Opportunites for Preceptors

Date: May 8, 2015
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Location: GEB A104

Overview:

Interprofessional education is becoming increasingly common in health professions’ pre-licensure curriculum.  As part of this education, students need “real” opportunities to see interprofessional collaborative practice role modeled and to practice “real” interprofessional team-based care.

This webinar responds to the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation’s recent call for aligning interprofessional education and clinical practice redesign to achieve the Triple Aim.  We need preceptors (aka clinical educators) and clinical sites developed where students experience both interprofessional practice and education in live patient care environments.

This webinar will feature two university approaches for developing preceptors to be interprofessional champions in the clinical environment.  Each case study will provide information on their approaches and materials, lessons learned and strategies for success.

Objectives:

1.    Identify the need for developing preceptors to align interprofessional education and clinical practice redesign.
2.    Compare and contrast two cases studies that feature a variety of approaches and materials for preceptor development.
3.    Discuss common barriers, lessons learned and strategies for success regarding development of preceptors that are interprofessional champions.

To register to attend this session go to: http://tinyurl.com/ipe-champions

Toastmasters Brain Builders UTHSC Chapter

Date: Every Tuesday
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Location: The Urban Child Institute, 600 Jefferson Avenue, 1st Floor, Conference Room 4

If you would like to become an engaging public speaker, improve your skills as a teacher, seminar speaker or when presenting professionally to your colleagues, joining a Toastmasters club will allow you to reach your goals fast in a professional environment. A Toastmasters meeting is a learn-by-doing workshop in which participants hone their speaking and leadership skills in a no-pressure atmosphere. Free parking is available and everyone is welcome!

For more information about Toastmasters contact Detlef Heck (dheck@uthsc.edu) or Bill Howell (atenra@comcast.net).

Additional Resources

2014: The Year of Active Learning at UTHSC
To access a variety of active learning resources visit https://academic.uthsc.edu/faculty/2014.php

UTHSC’s Faculty Resource Center
View schedule of professional development opportunities and read out latest blog post at https://uthsctlc.wordpress.com/