The innovation was years in the making and a demonstration of great collaboration.

A data visualization collaboration between the Michigan Center for Interprofessional Education (IPE) and U-M Information & Technology Services (ITS) has received a 2022 bronze award from 1EdTech, a non-profit collaborative advancing education technology and learning impact. The project is: “Competency-Based Tracking for Interprofessional Education Leveraging Institutional Data.”

 Watch a short video the team submitted to the awards competition describing the project.

How the U-M team described the challenge behind their project:

Health care education has been largely siloed and there are calls to shift to a collaborative and coordinated approach. Health care education programs are embracing interprofessional education as a way to modernize the teaching of future care providers. The goal is to improve the quadruple aim of care: improved patient outcomes, improved patient experience, reduced health care costs, and improved provider well-being. U-M’s Center for (IPE) has 5 defined IPE competencies that are tracked across approximately 35 IPE offerings and 5000 students from 10 schools across 3 campuses. With U-M’s growing number of IPE offerings, the Center for IPE faces the challenge of tracking offerings, student participation, and IPE competencies gained by learners. Tracking is further complicated because learning occurs using diverse formats including formal courses, online courses, modules embedded in courses, one-time events, and experiential settings.

The solution:

Recognizing that data existed in multiple places, the Center for IPE identified an opportunity to collaborate with U-M Information Technology and Services (ITS) to implement their vision for managing and bringing together data within and across programs, schools, and campuses. The team received an IP-X award in 2019 to work towards a solution. The resulting process leverages the learning outcomes in Canvas to allow for offerings and creating shell Canvas courses for all IPE offerings that fell outside of the traditional course offering format.

“This is a terrific example of administrative innovation,” said U-M Center for IPE director Raj Mangrulkar. “Building the critical infrastructure for us to share data across our schools isn’t easy to do. It requires creative thinking in IT, data systems, and integration with existing structures in order to visualize the progress of our learners in IPE. I’ve been really impressed with the collaboration between our IT staff in the schools and our Center, our faculty champions, and our university’s ITS unit in implementing this vision.”

The team is in the final stages of preparing this project for launch and utilization by the U-M campus. 

“It is a big step forward in being able to track IPE competencies that students achieve through diverse learning experiences from our different health science schools,” said Gundy Sweet, of the U-M  College of Pharmacy, and a leader on the project. “It will serve students, faculty, and administrators, particularly as all our professional schools require some level of reporting on IPE for accreditation.”

In addition to Sweet, key members of the project team include Vani Patterson (IPE Center), Melissa Gross (School of Kinesiology), Mark Fitzgerald (School of Dentistry), Dan Fischer (School of Social Work), Kate Weber (formerly School of Dentistry), Pushyami Gundala (ITS), and Jennifer Love (ITS).