Columbia University Medical Center Education Project

Executive Summary
Education Resources Recommendations

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July 2nd, 2004

This report describes the recommendations of the Education Resources Committee to improve the management of the education infrastructure at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). The findings of the committee included significant gaps in many areas of the education infrastructure. In addition, the committee found that there was an untapped opportunity to increase collaboration among the five schools within CUMC, which could lead to significant improvements in the quality of education for all CUMC students and residents.

CUMC-Wide Culture of Collaboration

Recommendation 1. The Committee recommends that a culture of collaboration and cooperation be developed among all health science schools, with its purpose to enhance the education and research at each school, and train the practitioners and researchers of tomorrow in a context of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Education Organization and Management

Recommendation 2. An Education Resources Council should be established to define and set priorities for educational initiatives, define the business requirements for educational technology, establish a central budget for major educational initiatives, provide cross-school coordination on education issues, and assure that solutions are found for common requirements and vulnerabilities.

Recommendation 3. A new Office of Education and Scholarly Resources should be created, responsible for the library, health sciences archiving, classroom management, and a combined education content and evaluation unit comprised of CERE, the Curriculum Design Studio, and the uptown branch of CCNMTL.

Recommendation 4. Resources for the new combined education content and evaluation unit should be increased. The Education Resources Council should be the point of direction for projects undertaken by this new combined education content and evaluation unit and the clearinghouse for priorities on projects requiring support from CCNMTL headquarters at Morningside.

Recommendation 5. CUMC should participate in the University-wide Advisory office on intellectual property and copyright protection that has been proposed for creation at the Morningside campus. At CUMC dedicated staff within the Office of Education and Scholarly Resources should assist faculty and students with issues of re-use and permissions to use Columbia-created materials.

Recommendation 6. A new office of Classroom Management should be established, reporting to the Office of Education and Scholarly Resources. This office should be the single point of contact for classroom scheduling and for securing services to classrooms. Through a cooperative relationship with the Information Commons, this office should assure that there is a “one-stop shopping” system that is created and publicized for all services relating to classrooms.

Recommendation 7. The nascent Glenda Garvey Teaching Academy should be expanded to a CUMC-wide Glenda Garvey Teaching Academy, and managed by the VP for Academic Affairs with advice from the Education Resources Council. The purposes of the teaching academy should be to support faculty to develop innovation in curricula, to transmit new teaching tools and techniques to the rest of the faculty, to recognize and honor leading teachers in all schools, and to develop a forum for implementation of cross-cutting curriculum initiatives.

Recommendation 8. Teaching must be valued and be an expectation of all faculty with professorial appointments (i.e., instructional faculty).

• There should be an expectation for all faculty members with professorial appointments to teach.
• Teaching activity and evaluation should be documented with the same attention to detail that is typically applied to scientific achievement when considering promotion and tenure.
• There is a need to evaluate, explore and codify methods for effectiveness in teaching
• Teaching activity quality and quantity must matter in the promotion and tenure process for all lines and in all schools.

Recommendation 9. CUMC should identify the costs of the education mission in all schools so as to more effectively budget and manage education to achieve its objectives. An equitable method for allocating central funds to support education in proportion to effort should be developed, and departments should be held accountable to use the funds for the educational purpose intended.

Recommendation 10. CUMC should develop a CUMC-wide office of continuing, non-degree, mid-career, and executive education to dramatically expand cross-disciplinary continuing education, specialized mid-career programs, and executive programs, and to provide a single focus for managing the associated infrastructure.

Education Space

Recommendation 11. Selected classrooms should be upgraded in the short term. Renovations should include improved lighting, fixed audio-visual equipment in each classroom, better projection screens, new whiteboards, better furniture, electric outlets, and in-classroom telephones.

Recommendation 12. Planning for additional clinical teaching space should be initiated and coordinated with New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Recommendation 13. More efficient and equitable methods of assigning currently available education space should be adopted. These methods should include using classrooms 50 hours per week, giving each school an equitable opportunity for the classrooms and times it prefers, scheduling classes to meet on the same day of the week and same time of day consistently once scheduled, and taking into account the specific needs of each school.

Recommendation 14. The room scheduling software currently in use should be upgraded to its latest version. The room scheduling software should be web-accessible and link to other key systems in course and student management.

Recommendation 15. An education building should be planned and built to deliver on the promise of a “Columbia education”. This building should house in whole or in part all the requirements for education: classrooms of all sizes, the “front end” of the library, student social space, study space, space to teach clinical skills (including a simulation center) and computational skills, faculty offices, and student services.

Information Technology

Recommendation 16. A University-wide Policy Committee on Education Technology should be created by the Provost to coordinate the evaluation of all education and classroom technologies. CUMC should actively participate in this Policy Committee once formed, in order to see that its needs are fully met through education technology acquisitions and deployments. It would be inappropriate for CUMC to address these issues without coordinating with Morningside for university-wide solutions.

Recommendation 17. CUMC should deploy, ideally in collaboration with the University, a course and content management system with state of the art functionality, using current tools or commercial tools, based on a thorough evaluation. Such collaboration with the University should assure that the deployment at CUMC is tailored to meet CUMC’s unique needs. The system ideally would have an open architecture, be customizable, have an open database, and accessible source code. An effective roll-out will require extensive buy-in, customization, and support.

Recommendation 18. CUMC should continue the collaborative consultation with the University Library to adopt, develop, and maintain a meta-data model suitable for its constituent schools, and agree on a naming convention for objects to be stored that will promote inter-school and inter-university sharing. This project is a pre-requisite to a usable common data repository for course and library content.

Recommendation 19. CUMC, ideally within the Policy Committee on Education Technology, but at least in consultation with the University Library and AcIS, should develop an approach for short-term and longer-term development of a content repository separate from CourseWorks, but with links between the systems.

Recommendation 20. Existing capabilities for electronically-based distance learning should be utilized to support education in dispersed clinical sites and education from and to the Morningside Heights campus.

Recommendation 21. Existing capabilities for continuing education and executive education for all health professionals, not just physicians, should be utilized, so continuing education can be provided through electronic media and distance learning. These capabilities should include access to an archive of materials on various topics of interest to practitioners as well as real-time continuing education through a distance-learning infrastructure.

Recommendation 22. A Center for Clinical Simulation should be developed, eventually with designated space in the new education building (or in a new clinical building), and adequate funding.

Recommendation 23. CUbhis capabilities should be expanded to include a new education tool kit group. This group will be responsible for educational applications development and integration as well as academic web design and implementation, following business requirements defined by the Education Resources Council and relevant faculty. This group should be jointly managed by the Associate VP for Information Resources and the Office of Education and Scholarly Resources. This group will be responsible for educational applications development and integration as well as academic web design and implementation.