From Jan Carline, University of Washington
Hi
I’ve gone through the document several times, and have focused primarily on the elements and their descriptions. I have not done any work in XHTML myself, so the specifics of the language are beyond my knowledge at this point. I believe that I have been able to follow the diagrams and the code so that I have a sense of how elements will be specified in this set of standards. I have also reviewed a number of other documents identified in the specifications as well as other specifications on the Medbiqutious website.
From my review, the elements that are included in the specifications would certainly be able to handle our current curriculum, and probably the revisions that we are planning for the next couple of years; the specifications appear to be very inclusive and include elements for the state-of-the-art medical curriculum. Currently, we do not include competencies in our curriculum descriptions or in our standards for educational progress through the program. I believe that will change in the future.
I appreciate the ability to have subscores and themes as elements in the descriptions. We will want to be able to administer tests for a course block that has items related to a variety of themes, and then be able to identify how a student on done on a particular theme across course blocks. I assume that the current elements would be able to handle this type of data specification. The additional tasks, I assume, will be to implement software that will be able to pull this information from the data set in a way to allow us this analysis.
The only potential issue for me in terms of elements deals with the ability to indicate when a student has repeated some activity. For example, we allow students who have failed an examination to remediate by a short period of study and then administration of an alternate test. The student may then have passed the course after a fail without having to repeat the course. We need to capture this information. How would this situation be dealt with by the proposed specifications? See example.
For someone like me who is not a programmer, additional elaboration of examples would be helpful in the document. For example, I think I have a sense of what ‘achievement in context’ means, but a more elaborated example would be helpful.
I hope that these comments are of help to you. There are other individuals on our current team reviewing software for curriculum management who are members of our IT organization and who might be able to provide more comment on the specifics of the xhtml language itself. Please let me know and I will pass the documents on to them.
Jan D Carline
Director of Educational Evaluation
School of Medicine
Professor, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education
From Medical College of Wisconsin
Tag beyond the global competencies (need more granular competencies). Get more granular details about individual students from external sources (NBME subject exams).
Deborah Simpson, Pamela Holt, Dawn Bragg, Kay Harbach
Stony Brook
Use RDF (Moisés Eisenberg)
Jean Berlo and Jeroen Donkers, University of Maastricht
See attached document describing how their system maps to the spec and what the problem areas are. There are some points that need clarification. In addition:
- They have assessment with overall scores and competency scores, not subscores.
- they are unable to map scores that have narrative values.
- They require levels of entrustment: observe only, perform under heavy supervision, perform under light supervision, perform without supervision, supervise.
- Entrustment occurs for activities, epas, or themes.
- They need a schema for the epass portfolio,
See Patty Hicks comments, Valerie's comments.
Larry Hurtubise, Ohio State University, team lead, Instructional services
See marked up spec attached.