Best Practices for Super Administrators

Having worked with hundreds of clients in higher education over the past 13 years, we’ve learned a lot about administration in post-secondary institutions. Recently, we published four Best Practices Guides to share some of the administration tips and tricks that we’ve encountered along the way.

We hope these guides will help you save time and avoid common pitfalls when implementing initiatives at your institution. If you’re interested in improving the way students fill in evaluation and patient encounter logs, are trying to figure out curriculum mapping, or are looking for the best way to represent student competency, you may find something useful in these guides.

We are adding more Best Practices Guides all the time, so make sure to sign up to be notified when a new guide becomes available.

You can also find the guides from the iCollaborative resource collection on MedEdPORTAL ®

Here’s a description of what’s available now:

On Encounter Logging:

How to optimize your encounter logs for a better student experience

Description: Having good encounter logs is important for your institution’s accreditation. When designing your procedure and patient encounter logs to be compliant with accreditation standards, it’s also important to remember that the structure of your logs can have an impact on the experience of filling in those logs.

For this guide, we looked at 5000 procedures recorded across 40 log forms and came up with some guidelines to help you improve the experience of filling in a log for your busy students.

On Curriculum Management:

How to create a great curriculum map without wasting a lot of time

Description: Curriculum mapping is a topic that comes up a lot for Medical Educators (See this LinkedIn group started by Anne Marie Cunningham if you’re interested in joining the conversation)

In our work with clients, we often see ambitious curriculum mapping projects fail because the final result was just not useful enough. Ideally, your curriculum map should be useful to your staff and students in addition to being compliant to LCME standards. This guide offers some ideas on how to make that happen.

On Evaluations and Assessment:

How to Visually Represent Competency: Spider Graphs & Radar Plots

More and more education programs are seeking to implement competency-based education and the ways in which they monitor and assess student performance are changing. This guide explores the use of an innovative way to visualize an individual’s competence—spider graphs. We discuss how to use spider graphs to assess competency in your program and look at the pros and cons of using this graphical method.

On your Technology ROI:

How to make better “buy or build” decisions when choosing administrative software

Buying a new software system is a large investment of time, money, and resources. It’s also a process that often affects many stakeholders throughout your institution. This guide offers some tips on how to approach the “buy or build” decision, from identifying the uncertain factors that will affect the decision, to measuring and reducing uncertainty and running small tests to see if you are heading in the right direction.