Kaizen: A Gaming Platform for Academic and Patient Education

Carolynn Thomas Jones and her colleagues presented a webinar on Kaizen, a gamification platform for teaching and learning. Kaizen has been used in academic programs in public health and nursing, including our own MACPR courses, to teach students about clinical research quality management and Good Clinical Practices (GCPs). Presenters for this session shared their experience with Kaizen and their development process for a game-manager user manual (their “field guide” to Kaizen). If you’ve been considering integration of an element of gamification in your course, this platform might be the tool you need!

View the webinar recording to find out more!

Skype for Business Basics

If you’ve ever had trouble creating or joining a Skype for Business meeting, or if your meeting attendees have ever had trouble joining, this 20-minute walk-through by Rourick David of the CON IT department is a must-view Flash Friday recording.  Learn how to create a Skype for Business meeting in Outlook and send invitations to your participants, no matter whether you are using Mac or Windows, or the Outlook  application on your computer or browser-based Outlook web app.  View the process of joining a meeting to better understand the meeting participant’s experience, especially the “lobby” people sometimes find themselves stuck in.  Find out how you can decide whether Skype for Business or Zoom is the better option for your meeting.

View the Flash Friday recording.

Kaizen: A Gamification Platform for Academic and Patient Education

When: Tuesday, November 13, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
Where: OSU CCTS, 240 Prior Hall
Join CON faculty member Carolynn Thomas Jones and her colleagues from University of Alabama at Birmingham to learn about Kaizen, a gamification platform for teaching and learning.  Kaizen has been used in academic programs in public health and nursing, including our own MACPR courses where students learn about clinical research quality management.  If you’ve been considering integrating an element of gamification in your course, find out if this platform might be just what you need.

UAB KAIZEN

A Gamification Platform for Academic Education, Training & Patient Education 

November 13, 2018; OSU CCTS, 240 Prior Hall

AGENDA

10:00      Welcome, Introductions (Carolynn Jones, Becky Jackson)

10:15      James H. Willig, MD, MSPH, Associate Professor,

UAB Division of Infectious Diseases

  • What is KAIZEN? The Story, The Applications, Future Plans

11:00      David Redden, PhD, Professor and Vice Chair of Biostatistics

UAB School of Public Health

  • R2T Kaizen; Academic applications (Biostatistics)

11:45      Penny Jester, MPH, RN, Instructor OSU CON/MACPR; Clinical Research Educator/Consultant

Carolynn Jones, DNP, MSPH, RN, Associate Professor, OSU College of Nursing/MACPR

  • Kaizen at UAB College of Nursing- Academic Courses and Patient Education
  • Kaizen at OSU: Quality Kaizen – MACPR Quality Course: NUR7482
  • In the Works: GCP Kaizen

12:15      Q&A Discussions, Demonstrations

1:00       Adjourn

Additional information on Kaizen

An invitation from MACPR faculty member, Carolynn Thomas Jones:

On Tuesday, November 13 (10-1pm ET), members of the CCTS at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are going to join faculty from the CON MACPR program to present the use of gamification for academic learning, training, and patient education. The game platform was developed by James Willig, MD at UAB for the purpose of educating interns and residents in the UAB internal medicine program via a gamification platform he has named Kaizen. It was a huge success with intensive engagement and a marked increase in board scores. Since that time, this gamification platform has been used for multiple academic programs in public health and nursing academic education, to train rigor, responsibility and transparency to translational scientists. It has also been used in nursing for patient education. Carolynn Jones and Penny Jester have used it in one of the MACPR Courses addressing clinical research quality management and are currently working on a Kaizen game for GCP training under a UAB CCTS supplement award. If you are interested in learning about this platform and toying with the idea of gamification in your courses or nursing applications, please RSVP by email to Terri Ryan at theresa.ryan@osumc.edu. We will be meeting at the OSU CCTS- Room 240 Prior.

“Your Password is ______.

Brace yourself for the latest in email scams: “Your password is ____”
Scammers are getting exceptionally clever lately and have started sending out very scary and convincing emails. These emails usually put a user’s actual password in the subject line to make it more credible, claim that they’ve hacked the recipient’s computer, and threaten to release very personal information to friends and family via social media if the scammer isn’t paid a large amount of money. While this is a very convincing trick, it’s still only a trick.

Here’s how they do it:

When websites get hacked, attackers often make off with a database of usernames, email addresses, and “hashed” (encrypted) passwords. While the passwords aren’t immediately useful, the hashes are usually posted to the internet where they can be reverse engineered and decrypted. If you were one of the affected users, anyone in the world can get a copy of your email and the password you used for that site.

Here’s a couple tips you can use to protect yourself:

  • Check https://haveibeenpwned.com. Enter your email address(es) into the field to see if any of your addresses have ever been affected by a breach. If so, you should assume that the password you used for that site is compromised and you should change it on any and all sites that share that password.
  • Use unique passwords for each website. If you use a password manager likechttps://www.lastpass.com/ or https://1password.com/, you can generate unique, secure passwords for every service you use and never have to remember them. If a site you use ever gets breached, attackers will only have your password for that site, instead of every site you use.
  • Change your passwords often, especially if you are informed that a service you use has been breached.

More phishing: Avoid taking the bait!

Please be especially vigilant for phishing emails. We’ve noticed an increased number of suspicious messages coming to faculty and students that are particularly clever.

Features of the current campaign have included:

  • Messages sent as a “reply to” a message already in the infected user’s inbox, which makes it harder to detect.
  • The body of the message does not contain a greeting, a signature or an explanation for why the user would be sending you a link rather than including the information in the message.  Messages may appear similar to this screenshot below.
  • Messages include a link that directs you to an unrecognized, possibly malicious site (usually addresses that end in something other than “osu.edu,” as depicted in the screenshot below).

The Office of the Chief Information Officer is working on this issue. In the meantime, please do click any links in suspicious emails and forward all suspicious emails to report-phish@osu.edu.

Link Validator in Carmen, and other tools to double-check your course

At the beginning of each semester, instructors often wonder if the pages and links they copied from their previous semester’s course transferred in good working order to the new, current-semester copy of their course.  There are many reasons a link that worked perfectly last semester might not work this semester, so it is best practice to check your Carmen course links at least once per term. Carmen has a handy link validator that will do this (mostly) automatically for you.  In your Carmen course, go to Settings > Validate Links in Content. The link validator will cause a process to run that identifies links in your course that may be problematic, and it will even tell you the reason for the problem.

If you have questions about using this tool, please let us know in the CON-IT department.  Also, check out the additional ways you can double-check your course for errors and usability according to the Canvas community.

Course Link Validator

Course Link Validator

Assessing the Quality of Multiple Choice Questions

I am often asked about how one knows whether a multiple choice question is “good” or not. Expertise in the field always makes the final decision, but there are guidelines and statistics that can provide very helpful support in writing and refining multiple choice questions.

Nikole Hicks, PhD, RN, CNE, wrote a Fairness of Items tool (FIT) to guide writing and assessment of multiple choice questions. Read more about her development of this tool. I have her permission to share it with OSU College of Nursing faculty, so email me (Joni) to obtain a copy.

If you are somewhat familiar with statistics and need a quick guide to quiz item analysis, refer to this PDF from Anne Schoening, PhD, RN CNE.

A more detailed explanation of item analysis of quiz questions is presented in this article McGahee and Ball (2009). You can access the full text of the article through the OSU Health Sciences Library.

As always, please consult with the your instructional design experts on the CON-IT team if you need additional assistance with question writing and evaluation.

Microsoft Exchange Online is Coming to the College of Nursing

By the end of this fiscal year, Ohio State Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) will migrate our email accounts from local servers to Exchange Online from Microsoft (MS).  This will increase email storage, simplify integration with other MS Office services and improve stewardship of university resources by leveraging the high-quality cloud services that are now available.

Your email, calendar items, contacts, tasks and notes will be migrated to the cloud after university business hours on July 16, 2018. Please close your Outlook and Skype for Business/Lync clients at the end of your work day on July 16, 2018.  After migration, OCIO will send a follow-up email to confirm your account was migrated to Exchange Online successfully. Because email accounts will be migrated in nightly batches, if you access other calendars and email accounts (in addition to your primary lastname.# account), you may notice a temporary disruption in permissions.  Any interruption will be temporary and will only occur if some accounts that you access have been migrated online, and others have yet to be migrated. To help you prepare, an Exchange migration checklist and additional Skype tips are available online. Your Outlook client or device should automatically reconfigure after your migration. If it did not reconfigure, be sure that you are using a supported client and/or mobile application.

You can check Microsoft’s online system requirements for Office. These requirements also apply to Exchange Online. If you have additional questions, please contact the IT Service Desk via online Self Service, or by phone at 614-688-4357 (HELP).  If you run into any issues after the date of your migration, please also feel free to contact the CON IT team at con-it@osu.edu.