from Jan Schwartz

I teach Practice Management 1 & 2 at the Asian Institute for Medical Studies.  We decided to try an experiment this past year with the delivery method of the of the two required business courses. We started with Practice Management 2 since that was on the schedule for the quarter. Half of the students lived in Tucson and the other half traveled from as far away as the Phoenix area (+100 miles up the road), so a technology-augmented course seemed reasonable.  Students also brought their computers to class so they could work as a group face to face.

Each quarter is 11 weeks in duration. The first week I spent going over the syllabus to be sure they all understood the learning outcomes for the course and then I asked them what information they wanted to have about the subjects and what activities would work best for the way they learned.

Practice Management 2 is all about the business plan, the regulations that govern acupuncture, and a few other topics that could be presented in a short period of time.  The class decided that they wanted to develop a business plan as a group in order to create a (fictitious) business that had a clinic in Tucson and one in Phoenix.  To cover the regulations and the other topics they decided to do individual presentations.  They self-selected the topics based on their individual interests and what they wanted to learn more about.  This happened to work out perfectly, but I can see the possibility of having to moderate this in the future.

I spent the next week re-organizing the learning site and posting the material on subjects they wanted to have access to, with suggestions on where to find more information.  The material was pretty much all on the site I had already constructed, I just had to move it around a bit.

During the second class one of the students set up the business plan template I gave them to work with on Google docs.  This allowed them to work together collaboratively, even from home.  (We did a fair amount of the overview in class and then they did the details outside of class). We did a tutorial in class on the use of Google docs and also on how to access the learning site, which is the Moodle platform, during this second class. The group decided who would cover what sections of the document and they got to work.  The end result was a fleshed out business plan that they could all use by just changing some of the particulars.

Ancillary readings were posted on the learning site so they could all access from their computers anytime, anywhere. Most of the readings that were posted online came from the web–blogs, websites, papers, and some ning discussion sites specifically geared toward acupuncturists.  I conducted the tutorial on this in class, demonstrating how to get into the site and navigate around it. I was able to  conduct this demonstration by using the wireless internet connection in the classroom with my computer hooked up to the projector.

I would have to say this course was quite successful.  The students really liked it and according to the course evals they learned what they wanted to learn and felt pretty confident that they could start their practice when they graduated, which of course was the ultimate goal.

Next post I’ll tell you about the Practice Management 1 course and how the technology worked in that course.

Photo credit: Flickr tsakshaug

Tags: collaborate, education, elearning, technology

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 5:03 am and is filed under education, elearning, learning technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.