A Reflection on One-Year of Teaching Anywhere On March 13, 2020, the UCI campus responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by transitioning to remote teaching. Educators in those early days were forced to quickly pivot to enable academic continuity for students while navigating the uncertainty of this unprecedented situation in terms of the length, depth and breadth that we know the pandemic to have impacted us now. In the midst of the disruption during the past year, the iMedEd Initiative hit a major 10-year milestone. iMedEd started with the launch of the one-to-one Apple iPad program in 2010 ..read more

COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Tool A COVID-19 contact-tracing tool co-created by Apple and Google has rolled out in California on a voluntary basis. This tool, which has been piloted on University of California campuses, aims to slow the spread by alerting people if they have spent time near someone who tests positive for COVID-19. The tool uses Bluetooth wireless signals that help determine exposure while still protecting the user’s privacy. To understand how the notifications work, watch: Exposure Notifications. To enable notifications on your smartphone: On an Android device, you can find ..read more

Emailing Medical Students The active directory for Office365 has been updated to clearly identify medical students in the contact lists. When emailing a student, you will see “(Medical Student)” appended to the name that is displayed in Outlook, for example, “Jane Doe (Medical Student)”. This clear indication of a student’s role, especially in situations when they have common names or names similar to that of others working at UCI Health, will help to distinguish them in email communications. This change was prompted in efforts to minimize the accidental sending of emails with sensitive ..read more

Teach Anywhere Spotlight: New Features in Zoom Zoom has been busy responding to its massive increase in usage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past few months, there have been several new updates to the Zoom application that address some common feature requests and overall improvement of the video conferencing experience. Some notable recent feature enhancements include the following: (Source: Zoom.com) Enhanced scheduling with default settings Scheduling a new meeting will always check the user’s web settings and use those as the default. Any changes from the default will be ..read more

Teach Anywhere Spotlight: Resources for Virtual Presentations and Remote Teaching As the pandemic continues to impact our daily teaching activities, it is important to move beyond “emergency remote teaching” and focus on the delivery of presentations and teaching for the virtual delivery methods that remain. The following are some resources to help you succeed online: Cut through the noise: How to design slides for virtual presentations Reclaim home court advantage for virtual presentations Twelve tips for rapidly migrating to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic Twelve tips for ..read more

Welcome to the Class of 2024! This academic year started off a little differently than past years for our new incoming class of medical students. The majority of their orientation sessions were held via Zoom, and the limited in-person activities were arranged in small-groups with students physically distanced and masked. There were, however, some aspects of orientation that were the same. For example, the UCI School of Medicine continues to require medical students to have their own personal Apple iPad to use throughout their medical school career. Through the iMedEd initiative, the ..read more

AMA Report on Curricular Diversity and Inclusion At the spring 2019 meeting of the Accelerating Change in Medical Education consortium of the American Medical Association (AMA), leadership teams from member institutions followed a structured process to consider potential educational inequities in medical curriculum, assessment and programming. UCI School of Medicine is honored to be a member of this AMA consortium and to have participated in this meeting. The outcomes from the consortium meeting are now available in a summary report from the AMA. This guidance is timely for medical ..read more

AAMC Anti-racism in Medicine Collection in MedEdPORTAL Read below for the message and anti-racism resource that Katherine McOwen, MSEd, senior director of Educational Affairs, Medical Education at the AAMC has shared with the medical education community: “The recent police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have continued to amplify the epidemic of racism in the United States, underscoring the physical, political, socioeconomic, and existential assaults continually experienced by all Black and Brown communities. As a journal of health professions educational resources, it i ..read more

Teach Anywhere Spotlight: Online Resources for Discussing Racism & Publishing your COVID-19 Related Work Online Resources for Discussing Racism Technology enables us to reach broader audiences for teaching and learning. Technology resources offered support in educating us about emergency remote teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology resources can also offer support in educating us to the ongoing injustices around diversity and inclusion to help us stand stronger and united against anti-Black racism. A few online resources that are available include: Talking About ..read more

Teach Anywhere Spotlight: Resources for Online Clinical Teaching and Learning In light of current social distancing efforts and institutional transitions to online teaching due to COVID-19, technology tools have become critical in plans to maintain academic and operational continuity. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has been leading efforts to centralize resources from medical schools for medical schools to help in the move to online/virtual instruction, especially in the challenging clinical space. These collections include: MedEdPORTAL Virtual Learning Resources dur ..read more