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Features to know in Elentra ME 1.26

A galaxy

We are pleased to announce that Elentra ME 1.26 and the maintenance releases 1.25.1, 1.24.2, and 1.23.3 are now available to all Consortium participants.

These high-level release notes contain a brief description of some key changes included in Elentra ME 1.26. Additional enhancements, bug fixes and more detailed information related to this release can be found in Elentra Collaborate here (login required).

Key Changes in Elentra ME 1.26

Update to Elentra Javascript Libraries
Contributors: Elentra Consortium Core Team

Like all software, Elentra relies on underlying technologies to support its function. These technologies (e.g., Bootstrap, Axios, CKEditor, etc.) need to be routinely updated so that improvements and security fixes within each of them are applied to Elentra. The Core Team work included updates to multiple Javascript libraries, resolving bugs related to those updates, and removing duplicated and unnecessary libraries. The effect of this work is to improve the security and stability of Elentra while also making it easier for developers to work with the code in the future.

Competency-Based Education Error Messaging
Contributors: Elentra Consortium Core Team

Following a community evaluation of the updated competency-based education (CBE) tools and curriculum framework builder, improvements to error messaging to improve the user experience were identified as a priority. The Core Team has implemented over a dozen new error messages to help users effectively navigate Elentra when configuring curriculum for use with CBE.

Assessment and Evaluation Confidential Item Type
Contributor: Duke-NUS

This new item type lets you included a place for assessors/evaluators to make narrative comments on forms, but have the responses hidden from the person the form is about.

Improvement to Assigning Graders in Gradebook Assessments
Contributor: UCLA

This enhancement to the Gradebook allows an administrator to import a csv to populate the grader to learner relationships for an assessment. This can save administrators significant time, especially in a course that includes multiple assessments with tutors or others consistently grading the work of the same learners.

Release Process Change

For the release of ME 1.26 the Core Team also piloted a process to include a community tester in our release preparation phase. We appreciate the time dedicated by staff from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to help us in our work. We are excited to evaluate the pilot and explore how we might further engage our community in our release cycle.

Thank you again to all of the contributing members of our Consortium community for helping to create Elentra ME 1.26.

Features to know in Elentra ME 1.25

A galaxy

We are pleased to announce that Elentra ME 1.25 and the maintenance releases 1.24.1, 1.23.2, and 1.22.3 are now available to all Consortium participants.

These high-level release notes contain a brief description of some key changes included in Elentra ME 1.25.

Key Changes in Elentra ME 1.25

Laravel 9 Upgrade
Contributors: Elentra Consortium Core Team

Laravel is the web application framework that the Elentra code relies on. The version of Laravel we were using was coming to the end of its life, so to ensure that we continue to receive the latest security fixes to Laravel, the Core Team upgraded from Laravel 6.20 to 9.0 in ME 1.25. This upgrade reduces security vulnerabilities and helps ensure a more stable product.

The Laravel upgrade also required a PHP upgrade which the Elentra Core Team addressed in Elentra ME 1.24. All schools should note that upgrading to Elentra ME 1.25 requires PHP 8+.

Creation of Seed Data and Writing Functional Tests for the API (application programming interface)
Contributors: Elentra Consortium Core Team

The Core Team have completed work to write functional tests to address virtually all end points in the Elentra API. The API is what lets Elentra send information from databases to the user interface. Creating functional tests for the API allows us to more easily test Elentra and make sure that when we pull in new code Elentra remains as stable as possible. With these tests included in ME 1.25, developers from Consortium schools now have a model to follow to write tests for their own code contributions. This supports our strategic goal to eventually require functional tests for all new or revised API end points.

Also included in Elentra ME 1.25 is seed data for developers to use. This provides an initial set of demo data to use when using Elentra.

Event Attendance Self-Reporting for Learners
Contributor: Northern Ontario School of Medicine

NOSM’s work introduces a new event attendance option that allows learners to self-report their attendance status from an event page without requiring a geolocation check. This feature enhancement optionally integrates with the existing Absence Management dashboard to allow for approvals of requested absences as desired.

Improved User Experience for Competency-Based Education Tools
Contributor: Elentra Consortium Core Team

Following user experience best practices, the Core Team implemented a series of changes to the user interface to continue to improve the experience of using the Curriculum Framework Builder introduced in ME 1.24.

Increased Options in the Assessment Plan Builder (Competency-Based Education)
Contributors: Elentra Consortium Core Team, University of Toronto

This feature enhancement introduces the ability to define dependencies across contextual variable responses in an assessment plan. It will allow post-graduate medical programs to better track learner progress towards meeting assessment plan requirements in Elentra.

Learner Self-Assessment Option in Learner Dashboard (Competency-Based Education)
Contributors: Elentra Consortium Core Team, Elentra Corporation, Queen’s University

This enhancement allows courses/programs to allow learners to self-assess their status on a curriculum objective on the learner dashboard. This can be enabled per course/program.

Thank you again to all of the contributing members of our Consortium community for helping to create Elentra ME 1.25.

Elentra ME 1.20 Released

Space Galaxy

On behalf of the Elentra Consortium community, I am pleased to announce that Elentra ME 1.20 and the 1.19.1, 1.18.2, and 1.17.3 maintenance releases are now available to all consortium participants.

For more detailed information and changes related to this release, please read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.20 for administrators documentation or the associated Jira Release (1.20.0, 1.19.1, 1.18.2, 1.17.3) for technical staff, which includes a total of 218 completed issues.

Features to Know in Elentra ME 1.20

Improvements to the Visual Calendar
Contributors: Washington State University, Elentra Consortium

Learners can now see their personalized Clinical Rotation schedule, assignment due dates, and recorded absences/leaves directly on their Dashboard & Learning Event calendar instead of having to switch between different tabs. This functionality is also available to administrative staff once they have selected a learner to view. There is also a new icon showing users when the contents of a Learning Event they’ve previously viewed has changed.

Improvements to Communities and Course Websites
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, UCLA, Elentra Cloud

The reliability and behavioral consistency of email notifications to community members (e.g., learners) within Community Announcements, Polling, and Events have been improved. There is also a new setting to control whether community administrators can create guest accounts or not. Improvements have also been made to the drag and drop file upload within Document Sharing and the common rich text editor component.

Learning Event Enhancements
Contributors: Elentra Cloud, Washington University in St. Louis

Organizations can now configure different Learning Event colors based on Learning Event Type (e.g., Lecture, Lab, Directed Independent Learning). This functionality is in addition to the existing color selector with an event or course. The ability to view the Learning Event location and attendance requirements from the “List View” on the Events page is also now visible.

Team-based Learning (TBL) Integration
Contributors: Kaiser Permanente, Elentra Consortium

Exciting new support for facilitating in-class or online Team-based Learning (TBL) sessions is now available by default. By enabling TBL support within a Learning Event, instructors can administer and review progress for in-class or online Individual Readiness Assessment Tests (iRATs), Group Readiness Assessment Tests (tRATs), and an MCQ-based Application Exercise (Appex).

External Assessor Management
Contributor: Northern Ontario School of Medicine

Administrative staff can now easily manage the list of External Assessors created by users in the Assessment & Evaluation module by going to Admin > Manage Users > Manage External Assessors.

Improvements to Course Gradebooks
Contributors: Elentra Cloud

Several new features and bug fixes for the Course Gradebook are available in this release of Elentra, including:

  • Course Website Discussion Forums can now be associated with a Course Gradebook, which greatly simplifies marking or reviewing a learner’s participation in course discussions.
  • An administrator can enable functionality to allow scores of more than 100% on Gradebook Assessments.
  • A new “Numeric Float” marking scheme has been added, enabling gradebook administrators to record numeric grades that do not have a denominator for the learners (e.g., 1534).

Assessment & Evaluation Enhancements
Contributors: Queen’s University, Elentra Cloud

The Assessment & Evaluation module continues to benefit from many improvements and enhancements by consortium participants. Some of the highlights included in this release are:

  • Several new standardized reports have been added to the Reports section making your assessment data readily available.
  • A new type of Grouped Item has been introduced to hold a collection of Numeric items. The person who creates the form can define a static total, and the person completing the form can define a total for that competition.
  • Reciprocal Distributions now support the ability to trigger tasks based on delegation-based distributions.

Curriculum Explorer Enhancements
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

The Curriculum Explorer can now report on curriculum tags that have been indirectly mapped to the selected course(s). This allows users to see, for example, where other taxonomies (i.e., AAMC PCRS) are taught without actually mapping them directly to a course.

System Reports Improvements
Contributor: Queen’s University

In addition to several fixes and improvements to the visual graphs throughout, administrators can now export report data in both Comma Separated Values (CSV) and PDF format on nearly all reports in Elentra. This ability significantly improves the accessibility of the data without technical intervention.

AAMC Curriculum Inventory Report Improvements
Contributor: UT Southwestern

The AAMC Curriculum Inventory XML report now includes the MedBiquitous assessment methods and resource types that have been mapped directly to Learning Events.

Clinical Experience Logbook Performance Improvements
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

Significant performance improvements have been made when loading Clinical Experience Logbooks for both learners and administrative staff, especially for implementations with heavy logging requirements.

Clinical Experience Rotation Scheduler Improvements
Contributor: University of Toronto

The Clinical Experience Rotation Scheduler now supports the ability to schedule Rotations by Course Group, in addition to scheduling by the individual learner. This allows institutions with larger cohorts that operate in small groups to much more efficiently schedule clinical rotations.

Exam Module Performance Improvements
Contributor: UCLA

Significant performance improvements have been made to the exam taking interface for learners, especially in situations where there are a significant number of active learners and large numbers of courses and exams.

Increased Flexibility for Institutional Numbers
Contributor: Elentra Cloud

Institutional identifiers (e.g., student numbers, staff numbers) can now contain non-numeric characters. This may appear to be a trivial enhancement; however, this will positively impact several institutions with staff/student numbers containing special and/or alpha characters and spaces (e.g., ST-002154323, 00122045, B*20022011034).

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra ME 1.19 is now available

Space Nebula

On behalf of the Elentra Consortium community, I am pleased to announce that Elentra ME 1.19 and the 1.18.1, 1.17.2, and 1.16.3 maintenance releases are now available.

For more detailed information and changes related to this release, please read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.19 for administrators documentation or the associated Jira Release (1.19.0, 1.18.1, 1.17.2, 1.16.3) for technical staff, which includes a total of 275 completed issues.

Features to Know in Elentra ME 1.19

CBME Enhancements
Contributors: Queen’s University

Elentra’s world-renowned support for Competency-based Medical Education (CBME) receives continuous enhancements with every release. This version introduces a Program’s ability to use multiple contextual variable options on the same assessment plan within the Assessment Plan Builder. Learners can now also see some Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA) progress details directly from their personalized Dashboard.

Dashboard Visual Calendar
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis

The visual calendar on the Elentra Dashboard has historically been reserved for learners in order to visualize their learning event schedule. Faculty members and staff have often requested that ability, so this release of Elentra standardizes the Dashboard visual calendar ability for learners, faculty, and staff. It now also allows users to overlay events from Communities they’re a member of, as well as selectable course calendars. These customizable calendar selections are saved on the Dashboard and in any subscribed calendar applications (e.g., Google Calendar, O365, Apple Calendar).

Learning Event Resource Time Estimations
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis

Faculty members can now provide the estimated amount of time it should take a learner to review each of the learning event resources added to an event. By collecting this data, administrators can now generate system reports showing the amount of time their learners spend on resources before, during, or after class.

Learning Event Geolocation-based Attendance Tracking
Contributor: National University of Singapore

By providing the longitude and latitude information of physical buildings within Location Management, administrators can unlock faculty members’ ability to enable learners to mark themselves as present during Learning Events that utilize attendance tracking. Learners will only be able to do so if their computer or device is physically within (or close to) the building.

Team-based Learning Support Beta
Contributors: Kaiser Permanente, Elentra Consortium

Support for facilitating in-class or online Team-based Learning (TBL) sessions is now available in beta form. By enabling TBL support in a Learning Event, instructors can administer in-class or online Individual Readiness Assessment Tests (iRATs), Group Readiness Assessment Tests (tRATs), and an MCQ-based Application Exercise.

Course Gradebook Improvements
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University

Several smaller improvements to the Course Gradebook have been completed in this release. There is a new Curriculum Tag selector for managing objectives tagged to Gradebook Assessments. Course administrators now have improved control over releasing Gradebook Assessments to learners, also the ability to specify a Grading Scale as a marking scheme input.

Course Website Improvements
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis

Course Administrators can now create and publish course notices (announcements) directly from their course website instead of going to Admin > Manage Notices. Course Administrators have the option of displaying a live view of the Course Gradebook on the course website.

Curriculum Explorer Improvements
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

Users can now visualize indirect curriculum tag mappings within the Curriculum Explorer. This functionality allows users to see what Courses, Learning Events, and Gradebook Assessments are mapped to a Curriculum Tag mapped to another Curriculum Tag. For example, if someone selects to explorer “AAMC PCRS 1.1,” they will see any Courses, Learning Events, and Gradebook Assessments that have been mapped to any curriculum tag that is mapped to “AAMC PCRS 1.1”.

Assessment & Evaluation Enhancements
Contributors: University of Toronto, Queen’s University, Rush Medical College, NOSM

The Assessment & Evaluation module is one of the largest and most sophisticated modules in Elentra and continues to benefit from many improvements and enhancements by consortium participants. Some of the highlights included in this release include:

  • Additions to the Assessment & Evaluation Dashboard to show more information about deleted tasks and task details (e.g., course/event name, start date, end date).
  • A new Form Responses Report that allows a report creator to view all assessment or evaluation tasks and responses.
  • Ability to apply embargo conditions to CBME Rubric Forms, which will prevent the form from being viewed by a target until certain conditions are met.
  • A new Distribution Method called Reciprocal Distributions is now available, which supports use cases such as sending a faculty evaluation task to the target of an assessment so that the learner can also evaluate their assessor.
  • The Distribution author no longer needs to specify Targets for Rotation Schedule Distributions, as assessors/evaluators can select the Target when completing the Task.
  • Expiry dates are now configurable for on-demand assessments.

New Notices Module
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis

The Notices module has been rewritten using Elentra JS 2, our new frontend application framework based on Vue.js. While functionality has not changed significantly, user experience improvements and modernizations have been made throughout the module. One new feature is the ability for authors to send notices to specific Course Enrollments, as well as Course Groups. Course Administrators also have the ability to create Notices directly from Course Websites as well.

New System Reports
Contributor: Queen’s University

Several new System Reports have been added, including:

  • Teaching Report By Faculty Member By Course (hourly)
  • Learning Events by Course Missing Objectives
  • Learning Events by Faculty Member
  • Course Objectives by Events Tagged (COBET)
  • Student Objective Competency Report
  • Assessments without Tagged Objectives

Technical Changes
Contributors: Queen’s University, Elentra Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis

  • Ability to have Elentra automatically provision new user accounts during a successful SSO sign-in.
  • Increased local password strength requirements to meet NIST 2020 Password Guidelines.
  • Several mobile device responsiveness improvements to areas within the application (e.g., Dashboard, Assessment & Evaluation).
  • Ability to integrate an external room reservation system via API when scheduling Learning Events.
  • A required deployment process change to use Deployer.
  • Elentra API upgraded to version 4.1.
  • Elentra JS upgraded to version 2.1.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University

Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra at Queen’s University & GitHub

We are excited to share an article that was published today on GitHub.com about the Elentra Consortium at Queen’s University’s use of the GitHub platform: https://github.com/customer-stories/queens-university

Elentra at Queen’s University on GitHub.com Customer Stories

This article gives Elentra some wonderful exposure (right beside Pinterest, Qualcomm, SAP, and Spotify), but it also highlights and markets how universities can use GitHub to collaborate on software development.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University

Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra ME 1.18 Released

Aurora Borealis

On behalf of the Elentra Consortium community, I am pleased to announce the immediate release of Elentra ME 1.18, as well as maintenance releases of Elentra ME 1.17.1, 1.16.2, and 1.15.3.

This release has been relatively significant in terms of new functionality added to Elentra ME, and we encourage you to familiarize yourself with the Features to Know section below.

For more detailed information and changes related to this release, please read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.18 for administrators or the associated Jira Release (1.18.0, 1.17.1, 1.16.2, 1.15.3) for technical staff, which includes a total of 403 completed issues!

Features to Know in Elentra ME 1.18

User Interface Improvements
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, University of Toronto

We have introduced a mobile device responsive default user interface template in this version of Elentra that provides a better experience when accessing the site from a smaller device. As part of this user interface refresh, we have also redesigned the user profile menu, organization switcher, and “My Elentra” sidebar item, consolidating these options into the primary navigation space. Further responsiveness improvements within modules are planned for future releases, but this work takes us a step closer to a “mobile-first” learner experience within Elentra.

Dashboard Calendar Improvements
Contributors: Queen’s University, UCLA

The “date picker” was reintroduced as an option on the Dashboard calendar, and configuration options were added to determine the display formatting of dates and times, as well as the days of the week that will appear on the calendar.

Learner Explorer
Contributor: Queen’s University

This release of Elentra introduces an exciting new Learner Explorer feature that enables Course Directors, Curricular/Program Coordinators, and Academic Advisors to explore a learner’s progress through the curriculum. This initial release visualizes a learner’s gradebook data from within Course Gradebooks, but significant visualization enhancements are planned for future releases.

Curriculum Tag Selector Improvements
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

The new Curriculum Tag Selector component, which was introduced in v1.17, has seen several improvements in this release, including the ability to map tags to specific curriculum periods and copy tags from one curriculum period to another within the context of a course. We have also added the new Curriculum Tag Selector component to the Learning Event Content page and added the ability to “contextually link” curriculum tags to both learning events and courses. Note: Curriculum mapping at the Course level has been moved to a new dedicated “Curriculum Tags” tab.

Course Gradebook & Grading Scale Improvements
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University, Elentra Cloud

Several new features and improvements have been made to both Course Gradebooks and organizational Grading Scales in this release including:

  • Organizations can have multiple Grading Scales within System Settings, and these Grading Scales can be associated with Course Gradebooks, Gradebook Assessment Collections, and Gradebook Assessments. Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University 
  • Administrators can define whether learners will see the recorded grade and/or the corresponding grading scale value (e.g., 96% and/or Honors) within “My Gradebook,” and various other user experience enhancements have also been made to the “My Gradebook” page for the learner. Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University
  • Significant improvements to the Grade Spreadsheet, both in terms of performance, as well as the ability to see Assessment Collections and the calculated grade for each learner for each Collection. Elentra Cloud, Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University
  • Administrators can define an audience for each Gradebook Assessment. Assessments can continue to be for the entire enrolment, or broken down by Course Group, or individual learner. Elentra Cloud
  • Administrators can now copy whole Course Gradebooks, including Collections, between Courses and Curriculum Periods. Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University

Multi-day Learning Events
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University

Administrators can create multi-day Learning Events with a shorter event duration. This feature is intended to support activities that may, for example, start on Monday and end on Friday, but will only take the learner 60 minutes to complete. This multi-day activity will need to be completed sometime during the week, but it will take a shorter amount of time.

Mapping MedBiquitous Assessment Methods & Resources
Contributors: Elentra Consortium, Western Michigan University, UTSW

In addition to MedBiquitous Resources, administrators can now map MedBiquitous Assessment Methods directly to Learning Events. We have also added the ability to map both MedBiquitous Assessment Methods and Resources to Learning Event Types, which are already associated with Learning Events.

Exam Taking User Interface Improvements
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

While working on some upcoming Team-based Learning features with Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, we have made some subtle, but impressive, user interface/experience improvements to the exam taking interface for learners.

Summary Assessment Tasks
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

Giving assessors visibility into a learner’s performance from previously completed Assessment & Evaluation Distributions has been a long-standing request. Designed with the help of several National University of Singapore stakeholders and various other Consortium participants, administrators can provide previously completed Distribution results to assessors when creating a new Distribution. The most common use case for this feature is to allow a Course/Program Director to see the results of previously completed assessments in-line while performing the final assessment of a learner.

Assessment Plan Builder Enhancements
Contributor: Queen’s University

The Assessment Plan Builder now supports the ability to add Procedure Forms, in addition to Supervisor Forms, Field Notes, and PPAs and Rubric Forms that have a global entrustment item. This information is also now visualized on the CBME Program Dashboard.

Assessment & Evaluation Enhancements
Contributors: NOSM, Queen’s University, University of Ottawa

The Assessment & Evaluation module is one of the largest and most sophisticated modules in the Elentra and continues to benefit from many improvements and enhancements by consortium participants. Some of the highlights included in this release include:

  • Assessment & Evaluation Task cards show the Date of Encounter and name of the task target. NOSM
  • A new Personal Prompted Responses tab has been added, along with the ability to record notes and mark items as reviewed. Queen’s
  • Ability to send a Learning Event-based Distribution to a specific percentage of enrolled attendees. Elentra Consortium
  • Ability to send Rotation-based Distributions by the site. NOSM
  • Ability to indicate a Course Unit as the target of an evaluation. uOttawa
  • Ability to deliver tasks before the start of a rotation or block. NOSM
  • Ability to send Distributions to specific Learner Levels. NOSM
  • Ability to specify the email name and address that a Distribution is sent from. NOSM
  • Ability to retire Distributions. NOSM
  • Ability to send a weekly digest reminder of delegation tasks. Queen’s

Clinical Experience Rotation Schedule and Lottery Improvements
Contributor: Elentra Consortium

Rotation Schedules and Lotteries can now be created using multiple courses, overcoming a previous limitation of a single course/program. This new flexibility better supports the needs of Undergraduate Medical programs without using a well-established workaround.

Clinical Experience Logbook Improvements
Contributor: Northern Ontario School of Medicine

Several administrative user interface and experience improvements have been made, along with several bug fixes and performance improvements.

Learner Absence Management Module
Contributor: University of Manitoba

This release of Elentra introduces a new Absence Management module that enables administrative staff to define allowable learner absences and will allow learners to log their absences where appropriate. Administrative staff or faculty can also approve absences, and relevant notifications are sent when necessary. This initial release does not integrate with “Leaves of Absence” or the existing Leave Tracking feature in the Clinical Experience module; however, this improvement will be made in a future release.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University

Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra ME 1.17 Released

Northern Lights

Release Announcement

On behalf of the Elentra Consortium community, I am so pleased to announce an early Christmas present… the release of Elentra ME 1.17, as well as stability releases of Elentra ME 1.16.1, and 1.15.2!

This notice was sent out to the Elentra Community Mailing List in December but was mistakingly not posted on our website. This message is being posted now to commemorate the release.

For detailed information about this release, please read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.17 for administrators or the associated Jira Release (1.17.0, 1.16.1, 1.15.2) for technical staff.

What you should know about Elentra ME 1.17

On-demand workflows for Assessment & Evaluation Forms
Contributors: uToronto, Queen’s

Program-based Assessment Plan Builder
Contributor: Queen’s

CBME Program Dashboard
Contributor: Queen’s
The CBME Program Dashboard is progressive visualization of learner progress towards the corresponding Assessment Plan for the course.

Dynamic delivery rules for Rotation-based Distributions
Contributor: Queen’s

All New Curriculum Tag Selector
Contributor: Elentra Core
An entirely redesigned Curriculum Tag Selector, currently in Manage Courses, but will permeate to Events, Exam Questions, Assessment & Evaluation Items, Portfolio Artifacts, Learning Objects, etc. over the next few releases.

Mobile Phone Number Support
Contributor: Elentra Engage 2018 Hackathon Winner
The new optional user profile mobile phone support includes phone number verification via Twilio.

SMS attendance tracking for Learning Events
Contributor: Elentra Engage 2018 Hackathon Winner
When enabled learners are able to mark themselves in attendance by sending a text message to the designated phone number.

Course Website auto enrolment of Learners
Contributor: Elentra Core

Bulk download of Learning Event file resources
Contributor: Elentra Engage 2019 Hackathon Winner
This option enables the ability for learners to to see Assignments that are due on their personalized Dashboard calendar and in their calendar feed.

Elentra ME login screen improvements
Contributor: Elentra Core

Time-based option in Clinical Experience Logbook
Contributor: Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM)

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra CPD 1.3 Released

The Elentra Consortium is pleased to announce the third release of Elentra CPD so far in 2019. Elentra CPD 1.3 is a relatively significant step forward for the application. In addition to a large number of behind-the-scenes improvements, administrators now have a great deal more flexibility when creating and managing Programs.

For detailed information about changes in this release, please read our comprehensive Elentra CPD Jira Release page. Our public summary of this information is as follows:

Program Presentations are now Sections & Activities

Previously, a Program was comprised of Presentations that had start and end times, locations, educators, and other fields. The concept of a presentation has now been split into “Program Sections” and “Program Activities” that also include:

  • a category (e.g., “Workshop,” “Presentation,” “Meal,” “Break”)
  • an optional/additional price
  • whether or not it is optional
  • the ability for the start or end date/time to be outside of the bounds of the Program dates, which allows for activities like pre/post Program web conferences.

Keeping track of who is attending optional activities

Any optional Program Activity will appear separately on the registration form, allowing registrants to opt-in, providing there is space to do so.

The “Download Days Attending, Question Summary and Additional Item Summary Report” now includes additional columns for each optional Activity, so it is easy to see which users are attending what Activities.

Program Sections and Program Activities now have prices

The Pricing page for Programs now supports pricing adjustments for any Sections or Activity. The user interface for creating pricing adjustments has also been streamlined so that the administrator no longer needs a separate adjustment for each profession.

Promotional Codes are now applied to Sections/Activities and Additional Items, instead of the entire program. For convenience, if any Promotional Codes have been applied to Sections/Activities, they will also appear at the bottom of the Pricing page.

Simplified two-step registration process

When a user is registering for a Program, they are immediately brought to a registration page. Registration options on this page (e.g., Program Sections, Program Activities, Additional Items) are automatically disabled if they have reached any capacity/quantity restrictions set by the administrator.

Registrants can apply discount codes, which are immediately applied to the registration. The total cost of the registration is displayed at the bottom of the order form so that the actual cost is displayed before proceeding to the next step.

Administrators have access to all Orders, Payments, and Refunds related to a Registration

When viewing a registration, administrators can now see all applicable orders and payments connected to the registration. When viewing an order, administrators can see what Sections and Activities have been selected, related prices, and any pricing adjustments that have been made. Previously, administrators could only see the initial order connected to a registration.

When viewing an order, administrators can alter the order or make changes to the pricing of items by applying Promotional Codes, by marking individual items as “free,” or by applying a discount to the entire order.

Administrators can also view and edit payments made for an order, as well as create full or partial refunds for a payment.

Program Details now contains more information for registrants

The Program Details page now lists all Program Sections for registrants, which includes current and future price options available (i.e., a student would see the student prices for Program Sections, along with price increases as the Program date approaches).

The schedule for a Program now separates the activities by the day.

Order and registration statuses are automatically updated when an order, payment, or refund is saved, the order’s status is updated. Then the registration status is updated to reflect the state of the order(s) belonging to that registration, relieving administrators of the responsibility of maintaining the statuses themselves.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra ME 1.16 Released

On behalf of the Elentra Consortium, I am pleased to announce that Elentra ME 1.16 has officially been released. Our primary focus of this release was to enhance and improve existing features within the software, as well as addressing bugs that have been fixed or reported by our community.

This quarterly release cycle also included maintenance releases of Elentra ME 1.13.3, 1.14.3, and 1.15.1. Schools who are running 1.13, 1.14, or 1.15 are encouraged to obtain the latest version from their corresponding release branch.

For detailed information about this release, please read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.16 and 1.15.1 changelog or see the associated Jira Release pages for 1.16 and 1.15.1.

Our public summary of improvements is as follows:

Improved LTI Integration

UCLA, Queen’s

Elentra ME has had limited LTI integration for several years. Significant advances have been made in this release to the management of LTI Providers and the flexibility of integration with external LTI enabled products.

CBME and Assessment & Evaluation Enhancements

The Assessment & Evaluation module is one of the largest and most sophisticated modules in the Elentra Platform and continues to benefit from continuous improvements and enhancements by consortium participants. Some of the highlights included in this release include:

  • automatically triggered standard rotation evaluations (Queen’s);
  • learners who complete a clinical rotation can now be tasked with automatically completing peer assessments (Queen’s);
  • assessments should not be able to be deleted by the assessor when they are marked as mandatory in the Distribution (Queen’s);
  • a “seen by target” icon is now displayed to the assessor on their My Completed Tasks page indicating that the target has seen the assessment (Queen’s);
  • a Distribution’s Delegator can now be set as the target of an assessment task by the assessor (Queen’s);
  • internal assessors/evaluators are now able to complete tasks without logging into the system (Queen’s);
  • home program administrators are now able to schedule assessments for their learners when the learner is scheduled into off-service rotations (Elentra Core);
  • program directors and administrators are now able to mark CBME stages as complete for learners in their program (uToronto);
  • a Distribution’s assessor list can now be automatically determined based on the preceptors who are associated with the rotations/blocks/slots of the selected Rotation Schedule (NOSM);
  • significant improvements and fixes were made to the Adhoc Distribution method, which can now be used when CBME functionality is enabled for an organization (Elentra Core);

Clinical Experience Improvements

Elentra Core

The Clinical Experience module consists of My Learners, Rotation Schedule, Logbook, and Lotteries sections, which have been built independently over the past 18 months. In this release, we have revisited the user interface of the different sections to improve consistency, experience, and performance.

Clinical Experience > Rotation Scheduling

uManitoba, Elentra Core

In addition to overall improvements within the Clinical Experience module, the following enhancements were made to the Rotation Scheduling section:

  • administrators can now attach files and resources to a rotation, which are accessible to the associated learners;
  • administrators can now define a list of sites, buildings, and/or rooms that are affiliated with rotations, blocks, or scheduling slots;
  • administrators can now define a list of preceptors affiliated with rotations, blocks, or scheduling slots;
  • learners can now approve or reject granular clinical events that they have been scheduled into by an administrator.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra CPD 1.2 Released

Northern Lights

The Elentra Consortium team is pleased to announce the release of Elentra CPD 1.2.

This marks the second Elentra CPD release so far this year and is a significant step forward as we begin to implement Laravel and Vue.js technologies within the software.

In addition to approximately 20 fixes and improvements, the most significant change in Elentra CPD 1.2 is the introduction of an improved Programs listing and management page, which supports advanced reporting and data exporting, allows users to select visible columns, filter data on user-defined criteria, sort on many of the columns, and download the data being viewed into a CSV export file.

Development work on Elentra CPD 1.3 has already begun, and our next release will focus on enhancing Workshop scheduling and registration capabilities of the platform.

We look forward to providing at least one more release announcement for Elentra CPD 1.3 in 2019, so stay tuned.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Register for Elentra Engage 2019, New York City

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues.

Elentra Engage 2019, where the community becomes our network.

Sponsored by the Elentra Consortium, this annual invitational event brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from international consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience. The 2019 conference will again have a track that is focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Administration, while the second is geared towards our Technical Professionals. Elentra Engage is an excellent professional development opportunity for staff and faculty. You will learn applicable skills specifically related to the integrated teaching and learning platform you use every day.

Be sure to book your hotel by July 1st to get our special conference hotel rate of $299 USD. Conference registration is open, so why not register today? Still not convinced? View our exciting conference agenda.

1. View Conference Agenda 2. Book my Hotel 3. Register for Conference

Elentra ME 1.15.0 Released

Space Galaxy

On behalf of the Elentra community, I am incredibly pleased to announce the official release of Elentra ME 1.15.0. It has been a busy quarter for our development community, and this release represents a significant amount of work including 2563 commits, 269 Jira issues, code contributions from nine university teams, and is yet another huge step forward for the Elentra Platform.

For detailed release information, you can read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.15 change log or associated Jira Release page, but this announcement provides some of the exciting release highlights.

Clinical Experience > Lottery

Elentra Core
The Clinical Experience Lottery is a full-featured clinical rotation scheduling module, which allows learners to select and rank their preferred rotation order from available administrator-defined options. Once learners have completed the ranking process, a sophisticated algorithm then attempts to give each learner their most desirable rotation order based on availability, before automatically publishing the rotation schedule.

Clinical Experience > Granular Clinical Event Scheduling

WSU, Elentra Core
Once a rotation schedule has been published, the granular clinical event scheduling feature enables administrators to schedule each learner into clinical events within each rotation. This feature can be used for clinic scheduling, or scheduling any other type of non-didactic event that can occur within a rotation.

Case Management

KP, Elentra Core
The case management features in Elentra ME allow administrators to define clinical cases and connect relevant learning events together that may occur throughout many different courses. The “case of the week” is also displayed to the learners on their Dashboard, along with all of the relevant learning events.

User Interface for Managing Learner Levels

uManitoba
If your organization uses learner levels you now have the ability to set the level for each learner on a per-course basis. This feature can be used for such things as PGY levels in Residency or academic year in Undergraduate Medicine.

CBME and Assessment & Evaluation Enhancements

Queen’s, uOttawa, uToronto
The Assessment & Evaluation module is one of the largest and most sophisticated modules in the Elentra Platform and continues to benefit from continuous improvements and enhancements by consortium participants. Some of the highlights included in this release include:

  • the ability to relate Curriculum Tracks to Distributions, Forms, Items, and Scales, and filter results based on the selected track (uOttawa);
  • the ability to target specific Learning Events for evaluation (uOttawa);
  • the ability to retire Forms and Items (uOttawa);
  • enhancements to the ability to trigger assessment tasks to external assessors (Queen’s, uToronto);
  • the ability to multi-select contextual variables within supervisor blueprint form (uToronto);
  • the ability to choose users from any role except student for Distribution Reviewers (uOttawa);
  • the ability to trigger assessment tasks in bulk instead of creating a new Distribution (Queen’s);
  • the ability to disable a learner’s ability to release evaluation forms to faculty (Queen’s).

Bookmark Enhancements

Elentra Core, KP
Several enhancements were made to the internal bookmarks feature, including the ability for users to add links to external services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and Office 365. Administrators also now have the ability to blacklist or ban certain domains from being bookmarkable by users.

Learning Events are now associated with Curriculum Periods

uOttawa, Elentra Core
Each Learning Event must now be associated with a curriculum period. This critical feature clears up any possible ambiguity around who the intended audience of a Learning Event is in cases where curriculum periods are overlapping (i.e., during Clerkship or in longitudinal courses).

Associate Communities/Course Websites with Curriculum Periods

uToronto
In cases where you would like to keep a consistent or permanent course website intact for a cohort, this feature will allow administrators to copy an existing course website and associate each copy with a different curriculum period.

Gradebook Assessment Document Delivery

UBC
The Course Gradebook has always been heavily utilized to allow learners to upload and submit digital assignments (e.g., PDFs, Word, PowerPoints) for a course. Now there is a new Document Delivery feature that will enable course administrators to distribute personalized documents to the learners in the course. This feature can be very useful for things like personalized instructions and assessment summaries.

Copy Course Groups from one Course to another

UCLA
This feature enables administrators to copy existing course groups and group members from one course to another, which is especially useful in cases where multiple courses utilize the same groups of learners.

Enhancements to the Learning Events calendar

WSU
The visual calendar within the Learning Events module has been modified to now show the pop-over preview of the selected event, which includes instructors, required preparation, attendance requirements, session breakdown, and resources. This functionality is consistent with how this information is displayed on the Dashboard for learners and faculty members.

Examity Integration in Exam Module

Queen’s
In addition to the existing RP-Now option, Elentra ME now supports scheduling and writing of remotely proctored high-stakes exams through the commercially available Examity service. Remote proctoring enables learners in remote sites to securely write high-stakes exams on their own computer, while ensuring exam integrity.

Changes Relevant for Technical Professionals

Upgrade of Zend Framework from v1 to v2

Zend, Elentra Core
We have invested in a major upgrade from Zend Framework 1.12 to several libraries offered by Zend Framework 2. Some of the components include Zend Permissions ACL, Zend Config, Zend Mail, Zend LDAP, Zend Console, and Zend i18n.

Initial Support for Programmatically Managing ACL Permissions

Queen’s
Access permissions within the Elentra Platform are handled by a highly adaptable database layer built on top of Zend Permissions ACL. While this functionality continues to serve us well, it does not easily support the ability to create/manage new dynamic permissions for individual users or adhoc groups of users. Queen’s has built the initial code required to support this functionality, with a user interface being developed to support this in a future version of Elentra.

LDAP Support Improvements

UCLA, Elentra Core
In order to support a growing number of LDAP and Active Directory configuration requirements by consortium IDM groups, we have redefined the LDAP configuration constants used by Elentra during authentication. During the upgrade process, make sure that you review the default settings.inc.php file and account for the new constants in your production settings file.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra CPD 1.1 Released

Space Nebula

It has been 3 years since Entrada CPD 1.0 was first released, and since then, there have been only minimal updates and fixes done to the core code base. Elentra CPD has quietly been doing its job as an application intended to manage all administrative aspects of live/online/blended programs, conferences, and workshops, including learner registration and credit tracking.

The Elentra Consortium is pleased to announce that this lull in Elentra CPD release activity officially comes to an end today, with the release of Elentra CPD 1.1, which was made possible by an exciting collaboration between Queen’s University and the University of British Columbia’s Continuing Professional Development offices. This is the first release of a series of updates planned for 2019 that will bring significant new features and enhancements to the software.

Our main focus for Elentra CPD 1.1 was to fast-forward the underlying software code base by merging together the significant architectural improvements from Elentra ME with the fixes and minor enhancements done by the Queen’s University, Education Technology Unit. As such, this is primarily a stability and architecture improvement release intended to pave the way for future feature development.

There are 158 completed issues tracked to version 1.1.0, but some of the improvements include:

  • A shiny new user interface to match other applications in the Elentra Platform.
  • The ability to create online communities or websites for each program, which can then be accessed by registrants before, during, or after the program.
  • Various program-level reporting improvements and corrections.
  • The ability to disable support for third-party registration contacts during the registration process at the application level.
  • The ability to specify whether or not registrants are able to select the number of days they are attending a multi-day program.
  • The initial introduction of Codeception unit, functional, and acceptance tests.
  • The introduction of Elentra API 1.3 and Elentra JS 1.2, which will be used for future modernizations.

We look forward to providing at least two more release announcements for Elentra CPD 1.2 and 1.3 in 2019, so stay tuned.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra ME 1.14.1 Released

Solar System

Elentra ME 1.14.0 was released on November 26th, 2018 within our consortium community; however, since then we have had several vital improvements and fixes to the software, as such, the Elentra Consortium community is pleased to announce the immediate release of Elentra ME 1.14.1! This announcement will cover features and improvements that apply to both versions (1.14.0 and 1.14.1).

Elentra ME 1.14.1

CBME Objective Tree Versioning (Queen’s)

Administrators can now add and manage multiple versions of the CBME Objective Tree within Courses or Programs. This allows you to update or modify EPAs when Programs have a need to change them over time.

Clinical Experience > Logbook (Elentra Core, University of Arizona – Tucson)

Our new unified Clinical Experience Logbook is built to support the complex requirements of Undergraduate and [Post]Graduate Medical Education. Logging requirements can be customized and managed per course or program, including the number of times an objective must be logged, what role the learner played, what environment (setting) it was experienced in, and more.

Clinical Experience > Lottery Alpha (Elentra Core)

Following a similar pattern at the Logbook, we have released an alpha version of the Clinical Lottery module in this version of Elentra ME. The goal of this alpha version is to provide administrators with an opportunity to review unfinished work to assess the direction and provide feedback. We have had a number of high-fidelity mockup review meetings to gather input as well, and we expect a final version in Elentra ME 1.15.

Learning Event Series (Elentra Core, University of Manitoba)

Creating a series of Learning Events has been entirely redesigned to be faster and easier. Administrators can now create recurring or series events and manage the majority of information for each event on a single screen (e.g., title, date, time, location, associated faculty, and learners).

Ad-hoc Assessment Support (National University of Singapore)

Administrators can now create ad-hoc assessment distributions within the Assessment & Evaluation module, without having the CBME functionality enabled within an organization. This feature provides faculty or learners with an ability to complete designated assessment forms at any time without any notification triggering or scheduling.

Course Reordering in Manage Courses (Elentra Core)

The administrative section for managing courses has been redesigned in Elentra JS, and now includes the ability to order and reorder Courses within its parent Curriculum Layout.

User Interface Sidebar Expand and Collapse (Elentra Core)

The sidebar that appears within Elentra ME can now be expanded and collapsed by the user as they wish. This ability is beneficial when trying to view lengthy horizontal information (like large-format tables) on the screen.

Learning Object Repository Improvements (Queen’s)

Learning Objects can now be associated with one or more organizations, rather than being open to all organizations. Authors can also tag Learning Objects with objectives or curriculum tags from any taxonomy tracked by the associated organizations.

Clinical Experience > Rotation Schedule Improvements (Elentra Core)

Learners are now ordered alphabetically by surname within a Rotation Schedule, which makes it easier to find someone. Administrators can once again schedule a learner into a span of consecutive blocks within a rotation. Scheduled leave, once again, appears on the Rotation Schedule for the learner.

For a more detailed list of feature fixes, changes, and additions, please visit the What’s New in ME 1.14 page within our user manual, or for a more comprehensive list of issues see the 1.14.0 and 1.14.1 release notes in Jira.

Technical Updates

Single Sign-on Improvements (Elentra Core)

When configuring single sign-on, administrators are now able to provide a decoding function to be used when processing the unique ID (e.g., Microsoft Object GUID).

Elentra JS v1.2

  • EJS String Composition Language has been updated to support string functions such as BOLD(), ITALIC(), LINK(), and UCFIRST().
  • With environment variables, it is now possible to pass in runtime variables to provide additional configuration directives to determine how an environment is initialized.
  • New $api and @redirectTo standard plugins have been added.
  • EJS unified file handling with improved script evaluation and dependency resolution. This change results in performance improvements of up to 300% in script processing.

For a complete list of changes and improvements to Elentra JS v1.2, please visit the internal release announcement on GitHub.

Elentra API v1.3.5

The following end-points have been added or improved:

  • /clinical – Improvements
  • /courses – New
  • /logbook – New
  • /lottery – Alpha
  • /portfolio – Improvements

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Elentra ME 1.13.0 Released

Space Galaxy

It is with great pleasure that the Elentra Consortium announces the release of Elentra ME 1.13.0. This is a very special release; it’s the first Elentra-branded version of our ME product, the first release under our new Elentra Community License (ECL v1), and the first release we have managed using Jira and GitHub. A lot of work has been done behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood to make this transition from Entrada to Elentra happen, and this release represents a major milestone in our history.

Congratulations to the Elentra Consortium community and a special thank you to all of the people at each of the Consortium participating schools for expediting the necessary legal review required to make this release possible.

Elentra ME 1.13.0

Branding and Project Management (Elentra Core)

Entrada is now Elentra and this obvious branding change is now reflected in our user interface. The user interface update was relatively simple but under-the-hood we have changed our GitHub organization, git repositories, and even changed the way our dependencies are loaded into the application. We have also transitioned to Jira for project management and planning, which will help us organize and communicate changes to our Platform.

Software License has Changed (Elentra Consortium)

For over 10-years the Entrada Platform was licensed under GNU GPL v3, an Open Source software license. It has served our community extremely well, but no longer reflected how our Consortium operates. To address these changes, we have created the Elentra Community License (ECL v1), a community-source software license that provides our community with flexibility and rights to our source code, while protecting it from unauthorized distribution and intellectual property risks.

Enhancements to Curriculum Tracks (University of Ottawa)

The existing Curriculum Tracks feature allows schools to identify and tag tracks or streams within an Organization and associate Courses with one or more tracks. The University of Ottawa uses this feature to identify language streams (i.e. French and English), while Queen’s University uses this to articulate learning tracks (i.e. Infection Immunity and Inflammation, Molecular Basis of Biology, etc.)

Schools can now associate Curriculum Tracks with individual Users (Admin > Manage Users), and Assessment Forms (Admin > Assessment & Evaluation), in addition to Courses.

Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) improvements (Queen’s University)

In our on-going effort to improve and refine CBME support in Elentra ME, this release includes the following features and enhancements:

  • Allows the Program Administrator to trigger both CBME and Generic Assessment Forms
  • Ability for faculty members to view learner assessment feedback, including the ability to comment and “thumbs up” a response
  • CBME Objectives for a Rotation are now copied forward when a rotation schedule is duplicated (i.e. EPA links and likelihood/priority rankings)
  • An aggregated report is now accessible from the learner dashboard, which includes a per assessor completion count
  • Competency Committee Members can now switch views of the EPA Encyclopedia for multiple programs
  • Auto-population of Entrustment Question text is now enabled by default
  • The Outstanding Tasks view for Program Administrators is now accessible from Admin > Assessment & Evaluation
  • The “My Faculty” list is now accessible to Program Coordinators within Assessment & Evaluation

Learning Events in a Visual Calendar (Elentra Core)

There have been several requests over the years to display Learning Events in a visual calendar format for all users within the application as well as the traditional list view, so we are pleased to report that you can now display, and filter events in a calendar view on the Learning Events tab and within a Course Website.

Lecture Capture Integration (Elentra Core, University of Manitoba)

Most universities provide learners with the ability to watch recorded versions of their lectures. This feature is commonly known as Lecture Capture, and thanks to the support of the University of Manitoba, we now support the ability to integrate room-specific recording schedules with preexisting hardware capture devices that automatically record and upload the video to a preexisting streaming server/service. Once the video resides on the streaming server/service, it will be visible to users as a “Streaming Resource” within the Learning Event in Elentra ME.

Course Gradebook Enhancements (Elentra Core, Wright State University)

There have been several improvements, fixes, and refinements to the Course Gradebook in this release. Thanks to Wright State University, we have introduced the concept of Weighted Collections. Gradebook Assessments can be grouped together into Collections, which can now be weighted in relation to the Course, and automatically calculate the value of each Assessment within its Collection. For example, if you have a Course Gradebook Collection called “Quizzes” that is worth 10% of the overall Course grade, that Collection can now contain several Assessments (i.e. “Quiz #1” worth 10%, “Quiz #2” worth 70%, and “Quiz #3” worth 20%) that equal 100% of the Collection, but are weighted to only account for 10% of the whole Course.

We have also added the ability for Graders (regardless of their group, permission, or affiliation with the Course) to appropriately grade assigned Gradebook Assessments. Parts of this feature were missing and/or broken in previous releases, so we pleased to advise this is now functioning as expected.

Rebuilt Portfolio Module (Elentra Core)

The ePortfolio module available in previous releases of Elentra ME has been entirely replaced with an updated Portfolio module, built using Elentra JS and the Elentra API. The functionality of this rebuilt module is nearly equivalent to its predecessor, but the user interface and user experience for learners and administrators have been vastly improved.

Rebuilt Logbook Module beta (University of Arizona – Tucson, Elentra Core)

Presently Elentra ME has two separate encounter/procedure logging modules available for use depending on context, which has caused confusion and unnecessary complexity. We are resolving this under the umbrella of the Clinical Experience module by replacing all existing Logbook functionality with a new unified tool.

This beta version of the new Logbook module is directly integrated into each Course and supports course-specific logging requirements to be captured. Important work is on-going, such as detailed reporting information, which will be available within the Clinical Experience module in the next release of Elentra ME.

Technical Updates

Elentra JS v1.1.1

The development of Elentra JS is an important focus of the Elentra Consortium Core Team, and the 1.1 release is the first major update to our next-gen framework. Many important updates have been made in this milestone, but to summarize briefly:

  • The EntradaJS namespace has been renamed to ElentraJS.
  • The filesystem location of Elentra JS has moved to www-root/ejs within Elentra ME.
  • Internationalization (i18n) Phase 1, which includes locales, string resources, language packs, and Elentra String Composition Language (ESCL).
  • Plugins Phase 1, which includes creating a new plugin, configuring plugins to install in environment.js, loading configured plugins and installing configured plugins.
  • Throttle, which is intended to ensure a given function is not executed more than once within a given period.
  • Component Library enhancements, which provide most of the UI elements necessary to develop a responsive single-page module within the Elentra Platform.

Elentra API v1.2.4

The Laravel-based API is now loaded into Elentra ME (by default) using Private Packagist, which requires some modifications to your Capistrano deployment script, and your School-specific composer registration key. This version of the API utilizes Laravel 5.5, which is a long-term support (LTS) edition of Laravel that we will likely stay at until early 2020.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Introducing the Elentra Consortium

The northern lights over a mountain range

Entrada Consortium becomes Elentra Consortium

In March of 2008, the MEdTech Unit toiled away in a Barrie Street office in the School of Medicine at Queen’s University trying to come up with a name to describe a new collaborative development effort between Queen’s University and University of Calgary. We wanted to do more than just share code with each other; we wanted to create a sustainable and inclusive community that would eventually meet all of the teaching, learning and administrative needs of modern medical education.

After nearly three days of deliberation, we decided on “Entrada” which means entrance in Spanish and Portuguese. This name was significant to us because we felt that Entrada was the front door to your medical education curriculum.

After a quick Canadian trademark search cleared on March 12, 2008, (we weren’t thinking Internationally at the time) we decided to use Entrada and began our journey to success.

10-years later, the Entrada Consortium is a vibrant and thriving International community of 18 Medical schools, including our three founding schools: Queen’s University, University of Calgary, and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

Today, we are excited to announce that the Entrada Consortium will be rebranded as the Elentra Consortium.

Elentra Logo

Our new name Elentra™ looks to the future (Ele = enhanced learning environment), while representing our past (entra), and will provide a home for the Elentra Platform, which consists of Elentra Admissions, Elentra ME, and Elentra CPD.

The most important cornerstone of this effort, our consortium, which has collaborated to create this amazing platform, remains represented by a solid and growing Elentra Consortium core team, a key strategic unit within Queen’s University.

Over the next 3-months, before the Elentra ME 1.13 release, we will be working hard to update the branding of our website, transitioning GitHub, introducing Jira and strong Agile development methodologies such as user stories, sprints, and epics. Further and more detailed updates will go out as these changes are applied.

One important question that has been raised by a few schools which have not renamed their local instance of Entrada to something other than Entrada is “can we continue to use the name Entrada?” Yes, we have no issue with your local implementation of Elentra being branded as Entrada, MedTech Central, Osler, Gryphon, eFlo, or any other name. Our Elentra rebranding effort does not need to impact your local implementation.

If you have any questions or feedback, as always, please do not hesitate to reach out by telephone, Slack, or email.

Sincerely,
Matt Simpson

Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine,
Queen’s University
Abramsky Hall, Room 206
Kingston, Ontario
Canada, K7L 3N6

Phone: 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]
Web: https://entrada.org

Entrada Conf 2018 Announced

Aurora Borealis

Save the Date

September 17–18, 2018
Vancouver, British Columbia

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues. Entrada Conf 2018, where the community becomes our network.

Sponsored by the Entrada Consortium, Entrada Conf is an annual event that brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from international consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience.

The 2018 conference will again have a track that is focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Administration, while the second is geared towards our Technical Professionals.

Topics will include:

  • What it takes to manage and govern the Entrada Platform at your institution effectively.
  • How the functional processes of your medical school can map to features available within the Entrada Platform.
  • How to effectively manage your curriculum data and the processes that support curriculum renewal.
  • How Entrada ME supports Competency-Based Medical Education.

Help shape the future of your Entrada Platform by providing direct feedback and interacting with the Entrada Executive Committee.

Have a Topic Idea? Call For Submissions

The Call for Submissions is open to all faculty and staff of Entrada Consortium member institutions. We are looking for people who are interested in presenting topics or ideas related to Entrada and/or educational technology. Please submit your session or topic idea by April 20th, 2018.

Please feel free to contact Laura McDiarmid at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions related to the conference.

Locations & Accommodations

Entrada Conf 2018 is happening at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver; a hub for dialogue and engagement initiatives that is just steps from the official conference hotel. The Delta Hotels Vancouver Downtown Suites is just minutes from all Vancouver has to offer. There is a special conference rate of $229.00 CAD per night. August 1, 2018 is the last day to book a room, so make sure to book early.

Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue
3300 – 515 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6B 1L6 Canada

Delta Hotels Vancouver Downtown Suites
550 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6B 1L6 Canada

Add Entrada Conf 2018 To Your Calendar

You can use this iCalendar file to easily import Entrada Conf 2018 on September 17th and 18th into your favorite calendar application. For most, just download then double-click to import.

Entrada ME 1.12.0 Released

Northern Lights

The Entrada Consortium Community has been incredibly busy over the past four months producing new features and enhancing numerous existing components. There have been over 125 bug fixes, refinements, and enhancements and today we are pleased to announce the release of Entrada ME 1.11.2 and 1.12.0 Consortium Edition.

Entrada ME 1.12.0

CBME Enhancements (Queen’s)

Competency-Based Medical Education support, which was introduced in Entrada ME 1.11, continues to receive major enhancements and improvements from the Queen’s University team as a result of extensive stakeholder engagement and user feedback. For more information on CBME support in Entrada ME visit: https://entrada.org/about/cbme

Course/Program CBME Tab

  • Programs can now upload and provide Program-specific Key and Enabling Competencies.
  • An improved user interface allows Program Directors and Administrators to view previously uploaded procedure attributes within contextual variable responses.
  • Program Directors and Administrators can now make minor modifications to previously uploaded EPAs, Milestones, Key and Enabling Competencies. These minor changes would include things like typo-fixes or updating a description, but does not represent full version control of EPAs!
  • Programs can now create Assessment Plans, which identify assessment and sampling requirements based on the forms created for their Program. For now, this feature simply collects information but later will be leveraged to generate full progress reports.

CBME Dashboard

  • EPAs mapped to the learner’s current rotation are now highlighted with a colored border. Note that this will only function for organizations using the Rotation Scheduler within the Clinical Experience module.
  • EPA likeliness and priority icons are now shown to the learner when an EPA is deemed a priority. A bar graph shows how likely the learner is to encounter a specific EPA in their current rotation.
  • A new aggregate report by form within an EPA is now available from a learners CBME Dashboard. This aggregate report includes a visual trend chart and provides an easy click-through to view a specific assessment.
  • Completed assessments now display by date of encounter, not date completed, to more accurately reflect learner progress.

Assessment & Evaluation Module Enhancement (Queen’s)

Administrator Improvements

  • Assessment Items can now be reordered on published Supervisor Forms, Field Notes, and Procedure Forms.
  • Program Administrators can now record “previously completed” (or handed-in on paper) assessments. This includes the ability to complete Assessment Tools on behalf of a selected Assessor.
  • Free text Comment Items can now be tagged with curriculum tags, which allows you to add a free text item to a rubric or PPA form and have the form be triggerable.
  • Program Administrators can now view Completed, In-Progress, Pending, and Deleted CBME tasks to better track which assessments are still awaiting completion.
  • A new Milestones Report shows a breakdown of completed assessments that have been tagged to Milestones and EPAs and is exportable as a CSV file.

Learner and Faculty Improvements

  • Improvements have been made to Trigger Assessment, allowing users to quickly find Current Stage EPAs, Current Rotation EPAs, and Priority EPAs using preset filters.
  • The learners home program is now displayed on the profile card when triggering an assessment.
  • Cues can now be provided by the learner when they are emailing assessment tools to their assessor. This lets the learner cognitively situate their assessor by adding an optional note to any assessment that will be emailed. It can also be used to remind the assessor about specific case details, provide a focus for assessment, or anything else that the learner feels the assessor should know before completing the assessment.
  • Users can now view Completed, In-Progress, Pending, and Deleted CBME tasks from the CBME Dashboard to better track which assessments are still awaiting completion.
  • Users now have the ability to mark completed assessments as read or unread. The number of unread assessments is visible within a badge on the CBME Dashboard.
  • Learners can now indicate “Helpful” assessments and feedback by clicking a “thumbs up” icon within a completed assessment.
  • Learners now also have the ability to set “PINS” within My Profile, which can be used by other learners when triggering assessments.

Clinical Experience Module (Entrada Core)

The new Clinical Experience module is the future home to all clinical education related features in Entrada. This first release includes the Rotation Schedule component to create complex block-based rotation schedules in a practical and visual way for both on-service and off-service clinical learners. It also supports scheduling learners into specific Sites and is natively tied into the Assessment & Evaluation module.

Learning Object Repository (Entrada Core)

Playing xAPI, TinCan, and even SCORM 2004 and 1.2 self-contained learning modules just got a whole lot easier. This initial release of the Learning Object Repository enables faculty and staff to upload learning modules in a Zip format, and then attach and play that learning module from within Learning Events. Enable the existing LRS functionality and your learning data can easily be collected and stored in your central LRS.

Exam Module Enhancements (UCLA, Entrada Core)

The Exam module, which was first introduced in version 1.9.0, received some big improvements in this version of Entrada.

Exams

  • Added the ability to create Exam Folders to create and store Exams within rather than just a single large list of Exams.
  • Exams can now be exported in Microsoft Word format for easy printing.
  • Improvements have been made to support previewing Exams with the calculator and self-timer options visible.
  • In addition to the randomization of question response order, Exams also support randomization of the questions themselves, with the ability to group or lock certain questions in order.
  • Significant performance improvements have been made, due to database query refactoring.

Exam Posts

  • All audience members of the selected Learning Event are now shown on the Audience step, which replaces Exceptions. Individual learner exceptions (i.e. different dates, exclusions, more time, etc.) can still be managed on this step.
  • The Security step is now the final step of the Exam Post wizard and is only visible if one of the secure exam options has been selected.
  • Significant performance improvements have been made, especially when learners are writing their exams.

Questions

  • A warning message is now displayed if no correct answer has been designated when creating a question.
  • Administrators and curricular coordinators can now make bulk changes to Curriculum Tags that have been mapped to Exam questions.

Duty Hour Tracking (University of Arizona – Tucson)

Entrada ME now provides Clerks with the ability to natively track their clinical duty hours. This functionality provides Clerkship Directors with assurances that Clerks are meeting the minimum, and not exceeding the maximum number of hours per week during Clerkship.

Improved CSV User Importer for Administrators (Entrada Core)

The ability to import users via the administrator interface, which was first introduced in 1.10.0, has been significantly improved to now support the updating of existing user accounts. By providing an existing institutional number, username, or email address in the CSV record, administrators can now make mass changes to existing accounts.

UI Improvements within Communities (Entrada Core)

Community course websites, discussion boards, and event calendars have received minor UI refinements to fix unflattering style issues. We have also resolved several issues with the Rich Text Editor, and display issues with iFrames through communities.

Ability to Manage Organization Specific Sites (Entrada Core)

In Entrada ME 1.9.0 we introduced the ability for organizations to manage Buildings and Rooms within System Setup. In this version, we have taken that step further and added a level for “Site” above the “Building” level. Administrators can now add Sites > Buildings > Rooms within System Settings > Organization > Location Management.

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved issue that allowed Course/Program Directors to potentially make changes to curriculum tags.
  • Resolved issue that prevented Course/Program Directors from accessing the CBME tab and the Assessment & Evaluation module.
  • The user photo import tool has been fixed and refactored to allow system administrators to easily match and import many user photos at once by command-line.
  • Course/Program Coordinators no longer see courses/programs that they do not have access to updating with Admin > Manage Courses. This was not a security issue, rather a display issue. Courses/programs were not accessible to them, they just displayed on the screen causing undue clutter.
  • Course/program Units navigation item now shows in the Manage Courses > cog menu if “weeks” support is enabled.
  • Performance improvements to the Message Centers (Notices) “Mark as Read” feature prevent slow page-loads due to large statistics tables.
  • Faculty members who were not included as Course Contacts for a course, could not access the Gradebook Grading page.
  • This release includes all fixes indicated for Entrada ME 1.11.2 below.

Entrada ME 1.11.2

Changes

  • Entrada ME 1.11 now points to the corresponding (/release/me/1.11) release branch for Entrada API.

Bug Fixes

  • PDF parsing library was missing to support Curriculum Search ability to index PDF Learning Event Resources.
  • Communities marked with “Group Registration” failed to allow students within selected cohorts to register as expected.
  • System polls were not showing to designated student cohorts.
  • Faculty could not add Admin Assistants if Entrada ME was installed in a sub-directory.
  • Incorrectly allowed Community Members to access Community Pages set to Administrator Only.
  • Failed to correctly display publicly accessible Communities.
  • Resolved issues with edge-case Rich Text Editor features (i.e. page anchor links, collapsible items, missing font selector).
  • Community discussion forum e-mail subscription icon wasn’t displaying correctly.
  • CBME form templates were showing even when the template was deleted.
  • Deleted Curriculum Tag Links were incorrectly still visible in some reports.
  • Curriculum Search did not provide results in specific newer versions of MariaDB due to a missing full-text index.
  • Some Learning Events were missed when copying events forward into Learning Event Drafts.
  • Added a missing Curriculum Map Version select box to add/edit Curriculum Tags dialog if multiple versions exist.
  • Single Sign-On was not allowing redirect to Entrada ME pages where authentication was not required.
  • Importing Grades via CSV to a Gradebook Assessment was not working as expected.
  • Manually updating Account Status changes in Manage Users was not saving the change.
  • Unable to add individual learners when creating Cohorts in Admin > Manage Cohorts.
  • Courses/Programs that were previously “deleted” were still showing as options when triggering Assessments for CBME.
  • User Disclaimers scoped to specific organizations were being displayed regardless of the organization.
  • Program Coordinators were unable to access Manage Courses due to missing ACL record for their role.
  • Active / All radio buttons were displaying oddly in Admin > Manage Cohorts.
  • Previously “deleted” users were still displaying in the Cohort they were previously assigned to.
  • Incorrectly removed the wrong user access permission for when editing user profiles.
  • Resolved an issue that prevented Dashboard Calendar from displaying to IE11 users. Please Note: IE11 is not officially supported.
  • Dashboard Calendar entries now show either black/white font depending on whether a light/dark color is selected.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Entrada Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://entrada.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Entrada ME 1.11.1 Released

Over the past four months the Entrada Consortium Community has contributed nearly 140 bug fixes, feature refinements, and major enhancements into the platform and today we are pleased to announce the release of Entrada ME 1.11.1 Consortium Edition.

Entrada ME 1.11.1

Full Featured Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) Support (Queen’s)

On July 1st, 2017 Queen’s University launched Competency-Based Medical Education to all Postgraduate Residency Training Programs. Technology played an essential role in the success of this launch, and the Health Sciences Education Technology Unit is proud to include full support for CBME in this release of Entrada ME. This feature consists of the ability to track and monitor the completion of stages, entrustable professional activities (EPAs), and milestones by learners, program directors, and competency committee members. Both learners and instructors can trigger assessments using a variety of methods including email notification, attending PIN entry, learner completion and attending confirmation, or double-blind assessment. Entrada’s assessment tools can be dynamically constructed using blueprints/templates to assess specific milestones/EPAs while also including program-specific contextual variables. For more information on CBME support in Entrada ME visit: https://entrada.org/about/cbme

Revisited Curriculum Management Functionality (UBC, uOttawa, Entrada Core)

The ability to manage curriculum tag sets and map tags to courses, learning events, exam questions, assessment/evaluation items, and tags within other taxonomies has been revisited and significantly improved. Tags can now be multi-lingual, and there is also the ability to import and export entire tag sets.

New Advanced Curriculum Search (UBC)

Users now have an “Advanced Search” option within the Curriculum Search feature, which supports a much more powerful/dynamic way of searching within learning event fields (i.e. title, description, instructor, etc.), file resources that have been uploaded, or objectives that have been mapped. Search results can be displayed in a Google-style list view, a comparative timeline view, or a tabular view, all of which can be exported to CSV/Excel.

Entrada ME Mobile 3.0 (Entrada Core)

The Entrada ME Mobile app is a crucial piece of technology in our strategic direction to fully support health sciences education in the clinical setting. Rewritten from scratch using React Native with support for iOS and Android, Entrada ME Mobile 3.0 uses the RESTful Entrada API and will serve as the foundation for new mobile features going forward. Entrada Consortium schools can either instruct their users to download the “Entrada ME Mobile” app from Apple iTunes or Google Play or can completely rebrand and submit their own app.

Enhancements to Assessment & Evaluations (Queen’s)

The Assessment & Evaluation module is the backbone of Entrada’s CBME support. As part of this on-going project the Assessment & Evaluation module has received continuous improvements and refinements over the past four releases of Entrada ME. This version includes Form Templates, Item Scale Banks, and improved Dashboard performance.

More Automated Testing! (Entrada Core, UBC)

We have introduced a new suite of automated UI acceptance tests powered by Behat and the Selenium Web Driver, as well as a significant increase in the number of unit tests. Automated testing is just beginning to become a standard part of the Entrada development workflow in part due to the important contributions of University of Toronto, UBC, and the Entrada Core team.

Entrada JS + Entrada API (Entrada Core)

The Entrada Core team is proud to introduce Entrada JS, an MVC-style application development pattern that layers on top of VueJS 2.5.1. This new pattern will serve as a foundational layer for new Entrada Admissions, Entrada ME, and Entrada CPD modules going forward. Schools developing new features should consult with the Entrada Core team about utilizing our new Service Orientated Architecture infrastructure.

Draft Learning Event Resources (Queen’s)

The ability to add draft resources to Learning Events. Draft resources won’t be visible to the learners until the instructors publish them.

Upload Multiple Event Resources (UBC)

The ability for instructors to quickly add multiple files at once to Learning Event Resources via drag and drop or multi-select.

Learner Levels (Queen’s)

A new concept of Learner Levels has been introduced, which allows organizations to articulate the level of training (i.e. 1st/2nd/3rd/4th Year or PGY1/PGY2/Fellow) for each learner. This feature exists primarily in the database at this time, but a management interface will be coming to a future release of Entrada ME.

Improvements to User Meta Data (uCalgary)

A little-known feature in Entrada ME has received a nice upgrade in this release. The User Meta Data feature provides organizations with the ability to capture “Extended Profile” information on different groups of users. For example, this could be used to record the N95 Mask Fit size or ACLS Certification status for each learner, or even the union representation for staff members, etc. Administrators can now indicate which metadata fields are released/visible to the users themselves, and there is also an import/export feature.

Improved Curriculum Reports (UBC, Entrada Core)

  1. A new Curriculum Tag Minutes and Mapping Report that shows the breakdown of how many minutes each objective tagged to a Learning Event is taught.
  2. A new Curriculum Tag Mapping Report that shows the relationship between tags mapped between different taxonomies. This report will allow you to visualize how the Program Objectives map to the Course Objectives that map to the Event Objectives.
  3. The Curriculum Review Report, Course Summary Report, and Learning Event Types by Course have had some visual updates to have a consistent look and feel with other similar reports.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Entrada Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://entrada.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Entrada Developers Choose PhpStorm

phpStorm by JetBrains The Entrada development team has selected PhpStorm by JetBrains as the officially sanctioned and recommended Integrated Development Environment for doing PHP development related to the Entrada Platform. For nearly four years, PhpStorm has provided the developers of our Open Source software with a reliable and feature rich IDE that sees continuous enhancements and improvements. Thank you to JetBrains for providing us with this.

Conflict of Interest Declaration: Due to the fact that Entrada is licensed under GPLv3, and in exchange for posting an entirely true statement about our development team’s experience using PhpStorm, JetBrains has granted our developers a no-cost license for the use of PhpStorm. For more information on PhpStorm, please visit the JetBrains website.

Entrada ME 1.10.0 Released

Northern Lights

Over the past three months, the Entrada development community has contributed over 90 bug fixes, feature refinements, and enhancements into Entrada ME, and today we are pleased to announce the immediate release of Entrada ME 1.10.0 Consortium Editions. The release of Entrada ME 1.10.0 Open Edition will follow, but is unavailable at the time of this release.

Entrada ME 1.10.0

Introduction of Laravel based REST API and VueJS (Entrada Core)

In June 2016 the Entrada development community decided to move Entrada towards Service Oriented Architecture (“SOA”), a path that would facilitate a non-disruptive modernization of Entrada’s underlying architecture. After a review of available frameworks and options, the SOA working group decided to adopt the Laravel PHP framework for our RESTful API, and VueJS to power the front-end user interface. This version of Entrada ME realizes that community decision by introducing the first RESTful API end-point, “Auth”. The new RESTful Auth end-point replaces our previous authentication server + client and continues to provide the flexibility and security needed for Entrada. We have also included a “Sandbox” module to demonstrate to developers how the Entrada ME + API + VueJS pattern works.

The path to completing the transition to SOA will be a long one, but this is the first step in that journey.

Accessibility Improvements (Entrada Core)

Entrada ME 1.10 introduces support allowing content authors to ensure the content they are entering into the platforms meets Accessibility guidelines. This Accessibility Checker icon is now available within all rich text editor windows.

Curriculum Search within Learning Event Resources (uCalgary, Entrada Core)

The Curriculum Search engine is now able to search within the contents of most Learning Event resources allowing users to gain a better understanding of where search terms appear within the curriculum. Currently, the indexing works only for PowerPoint, Word, PDF, HTML, and Text documents as they are uploaded, but future releases will be able to index existing content as well.

Flexible User Disclaimers (Entrada Core)

If your institution requires all users or certain types of users to read and accept agreements, policies, or attestations (i.e. terms of use, acceptable use, privacy policy, academic integrity, etc.) then you will pleased to learn that each organization within Entrada ME 1.10 now has the ability to configure and monitor these disclaimers. Configuration options include being able to specify when they appear (i.e. on login, when accessing courses or communities, etc.) and what happens when if they decline (i.e. auto log out, blocking of content, etc.).

New Visual Dashboard Calendar for Learners (UBC)

The visual calendar that appears on the Dashboard for learners has been updated and now includes the ability to view events by Day, Week, and Month views. It also accurately displays the custom colors selected for courses or learning events.

Significant Improvements to the Learner ePortfolio (WSU)

Improvements to the facilitated learner ePortfolio module have made it easier and more visually appealing to use. Learners can now easily see and track what artifact requirements are outstanding, and they can also see when their mentor/advisor has reviewed an artifact. Another important and exciting addition is that ePortfolios can now also be directly attached to the Course Gradebook, which allows markers/graders a very simple and efficient way to review and mark portfolios.

Improvements to AAMC Curriculum Inventory XML Generation (UT Southwestern)

Entrada continues to improve the quality and robustness of the AAMC Curriculum Inventory XML that is generated by the system. UT Southwestern has contributed several enhancements that help to correctly identify the length of Clerkships and improve performance.

Improvements to Gradebook Assessment Form UI (Queen’s)

User interface styles for grading rubrics and assessment item types within the Gradebook have been refined and improved for this version of Entrada, as well as several bugs have also been addressed

Custom Series of Learning Events (Entrada Core)

The Recurring Event feature within Learning Events now supports the creation of a custom series/schedule of events. For example, if you would like to create a single event that occurs at six different times, you can now easily create a custom series of six events and specify the custom date and time of each event.

Exam Module Improvements and Fixes (UCLA)

The first version of the Exam module was introduced in Entrada ME 1.9, and we have since discovered and resolved several bugs and user experience issues. We have also added an important new feature in this version, which is the ability to automatically transfer exam/quiz/test grades directly to the learners’ Course Gradebook.

Mapping Medbiquitous Resources to Learning Events (Entrada Core, WSU)

Entrada has had the ability store the Medbiq Resources for a number of versions, but we now give faculty and administrative staff the ability to map this terminology directly to Learning Events in the user interface. This information will shortly be reflected in the AAMC Curriculum Inventory XML file as well.

Importing and Exporting Data in Entrada ME (Entrada Core)

Administrators can now import new Entrada ME users directly through the user interface. This feature did not previously exist because typically users were synchronized as a background process from an authoritative source such as a SIS or faculty database; however, this feature will ease the initial adoption of Entrada by new schools.

We have also added the ability to import and export Cohorts (classes) of learners and Course Groups through the user interface. This will allow for more efficient management of groups of learners by curricular coordinators and administrative staff.

User Profile Name Generational Suffixes and Post-Nominal Letters (UCLA)

By enabling the new profile_name_extensions setting Entrada administrators are allowing people to indicate generational suffixes of their name, as well as any post-nominal letters they may have.

Unified Pagination Strategy (Entrada Core)

To reduce the number of different pagination strategies employed by modules throughout Entrada we have introduced a new Entrada_Pagination class that should be used in most cases by developers, and have also converted most modules to use this new class.

Other Technical Improvements Include

  • Added language translations for Clerkship and Communities (NUS)
  • Fixes and improvements when exporting Learning Events in Admin > Manage Events (Entrada Core)
  • Ability to customize the default Learning Event Type duration (Entrada Core)
  • Improvements to Assessment & Evaluation module admin dashboard (Queen’s)
  • Improvements to customizability of how dates and times are displayed throughout Entrada (NUS)
  • Improvements to how My Communities are displayed in the sidebar (Entrada Core)
  • Improvements and fixes to user session timeout notification (Entrada Core)

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Entrada Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Entrada Conf 2017 Registration Now Open

Chicago

Registration for Entrada Conf 2017 is now open!

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues.

Sponsored by the Entrada Consortium, this annual event brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from 12 to 15 International consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience.

This year we are pleased to announce that we have expanded and refocused our conference to include an accredited Faculty and Administration track. Physicians who attend will be eligible for continuing medical education credits in Canada and the United States.

Learn more by visiting our conference website at: https://conference.entrada.org

Entrada Conf 2017 Announced

Chicago

Save the Date

September 25–26, 2017
Chicago, Illinois

Registration for Entrada Conf 2017 opens in June

Entrada Conf 2017 Graphic

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues. Entrada Conf 2017, where the community becomes our network.

Sponsored by the Entrada Consortium, Entrada Conf is an annual event that brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from 12 to 15 International consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience.

This conference has historically been focused on the technical aspects Entrada; while this important topic will remain as the “Technical Professionals” track, the Entrada Conference Planning Committee is pleased to announce that we have expanded and refocused the event to now include an accredited Faculty and Administration track. Physicians who attend will be eligible for continuing medical education credits in Canada and the United States.

Two Conference Tracks

The first conference track is focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Administration, while the second is geared towards our Technical Professionals.

Some Session Topics Include

  • Learn what it takes to manage and govern the Entrada Platform at your institution effectively.
  • Learn how the functional processes of your medical school can map to features available within the Entrada Platform.
  • Learn how to effectively manage your curriculum data and the processes that support curriculum renewal.
  • Learn how Entrada ME supports Competency-Based Medical Education.
  • Help shape the future of your Entrada Platform by providing direct feedback and interacting with the Entrada Executive Committee.
  • Hackathon! Have an idea for something great in Entrada? Watch as 2 teams of developers compete to build your idea into the platform live. May the best team and feature win!

Have a Topic Idea? Call For Submissions

The Call for Submissions is open to all faculty and staff of Entrada Consortium member institutions. We are looking for people who are interested in presenting topics or ideas related to Entrada and/or educational technology. Please submit your session or topic idea by June 13th, 2017.

Please feel free to contact Matt Simpson at 613-533-6000 x78146 or [email protected] with any questions or suggestions related to the conference.

Locations & Accommodations

OFFSITE Chicago is a creative, inspiring and high-tech environment that is just steps from the Hampton Inn Chicago Downtown West Loop hotel. A hotel room block has been reserved at a special conference rate of $199USD per night.

560 W Washington Blvd
Chicago, IL 60661

Add Entrada Conf 2017 To Your Calendar

You can use this iCalendar file to easily import Entrada Conf 2017 on September 25th and 26th into your favorite calendar application. For most, just download then double-click to import.

Entrada ME 1.9.0 Released

Space Nebula

Over the past three months, the Entrada development community has contributed over 165 bug fixes, feature refinements, and enhancements into Entrada ME, and today we are pleased to announce the immediate release of Entrada ME 1.8.1 and 1.9.0 Open and Consortium Editions.

Entrada ME 1.9.0

Secure Testing / Exam module (UCLA)

Entrada ME 1.9 can conduct both secured or non-secured exams, tests, and quizzes using a standard web-browser and optionally coupled with Open Source or Commercially supported computer lock-down technology. This feature also includes the ability to facilitate remote Proctoring of Exams by audio, video, and screen recording the exam taker. The Exam module supports a Question Bank, Exam Builder, and several item types including MCQ, short answer, essay, matching, text, and fill-in-the-blank.

My Bookmarks feature (UCLA)

Entrada ME now includes an optional internal bookmarking feature that allows users to quickly access pages, reports, or system functionality they use most frequently. Bookmarks are searchable and sortable.

Room & Location Management (UCLA, uCalgary, Entrada Core)

Physical building and room management have been a long requested features within Entrada. Administrators now have the ability to manage buildings and rooms. Once rooms have been created, they are selectable within the Learning Events setup section.

Curriculum Matrix enhancements (Entrada Core)

The Curriculum Matrix now shows the number of times each objective is tagged throughout the curriculum. With this information easily accessible, users can be made aware of objectives that are not being covered adequately.

Faculty & Staff as Learners (Queen’s)

Added the ability to associate faculty and staff members as the audience within a Cohort or Learning Event

Improvements to Assessment & Evaluation (Queen’s)

Significant improvements and refactoring to many aspects within the Assessment & Evaluation module, including the Dashboard, Distribution Engine, Form Builder, and Item Bank (Queen’s)

Learning Event module refinements (Entrada Core)

Added option to indicate a parent + child Learning Event relationship when creating recurring events

Color Code Courses & Learning Events (UBC)

Added the ability to color code Courses & Learning Events

Accessibility Improvements (uOttawa, Entrada Core)

Removed the 5-second pause between actions within the Entrada Community module

Other Technical Improvements Include

  • Entrada now requires PHP 5.6.3+
  • Updated Medbiquitous Resources to reflect recent changes (Entrada Core)
  • Entrada CLI’s model –create utility has been significantly improved (Entrada Core)
  • There is now an option to lazy load data into our AdvancedSearch jQuery plug-in (Queen’s)
  • Configurable regular expressions in settings.inc.php: KIOSK_MODE_CARD_PARSER – defines the format of the “student number” when swiping cards in “Kiosk Mode” for attendance tracking, and VIDEO_EMBED_REGEX – to specify the allowed video sources for embedding video (WSU).
  • Configurable option in entrada.settings table to determine whether or not to display Podcasting and My Bookmarks sidebar items (NUS, Entrada Core)
  • Increased the default Community soft quota size from 100MB to 1GB (WSU)
  • Added the ability to customize the visual layout of the Learning Events > Event page on a per-organization basis (WSU)
  • Added a JMeter load testing template (UBC)

Entrada ME 1.8.1

We have also decided to do a subsequent 1.8 release as well to resolve several bugs within the 1.8.0 code base. These fixes included:

  • Deleted unused API files.
  • Fixed several bugs within the Clinical Rotation Scheduler.
  • Made the province/state selector optional for countries without provinces or states.
  • Added the ability to enable/disable the Podcast sidebar.
  • Fixed several bugs with the facilitated learner ePortfolio.
  • Added a missing database table index to the objectives table.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Entrada Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Entrada ME 1.8.0 Released

Solar System

The Entrada Consortium Development Community is pleased to announce that Entrada ME 1.8.0 is now available in both Open Edition and Consortium Edition flavours.

This release packs in many development efforts from Q3 and Q4 2016 including an updated and further refined user interface, refactored course management, course gradebook, assessment and evaluation, and more. There have been 232 Issues (bugs and enhancements) addressed in this release. Here are some of the new goodies in Entrada ME 1.8.0:

  • A slick new semi-responsive default user interface that looks great in the browser.
  • Initial release of the new Assessment & Evaluation module that will become a complete replacement for the Evaluations module in a future release.
  • The Evaluations module has been renamed to Clerkship Evaluations and will remain in Entrada until the new Assessment & Evaluation module can facilitate all of the features.
  • A brand new Course Gradebook module with full support for inline document viewing (i.e. PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc.) in the web-browser, and marking uploaded assignments using an Assessment Form created within the Assessment & Evaluation module.
  • Assessments within a Course Gradebook can now have additional Graders associated with them. A Grader will receive the permissions required to grade associated students’ assessments.
  • A new Clinical Rotation Schedule management tool for placing learners of a Course or Program into a configurable block rotation schedule (i.e. 1-week, 2-week, or 4-weeks).
  • A redesigned Course Groups module that supports the automatic population of small groups based on many criteria including the number of groups, the size of groups, and gender diversity.
  • Administrators can now enable Twitter integration. Each Organization, Course, and Community can optionally indicate the Twitter handle and hashtag they use. Relevant tweets will show up on the Dashboard, Course Website, and within associated Communities.
  • The Curriculum Search now searches through the code, title, and description of all Curriculum Tags (i.e. objectives) that have been mapped to at the Learning Event or Course level. There have also been usability improvements to the Curriculum Search in both Text Results and Timeline search mode.
  • A new session timeout alert dialog will now warn you two minutes before your session expires and give you the option to extend or log out.
  • Several user interface refinements within the People Search module.
  • The ability to export a draft Learning Event schedule from the Admin > Manage Events > Manage My Drafts section.
  • New ability to roll over course content from one course to a new course within the Admin > Manage Events > Manage My Drafts section.
  • Improvements to the consistency of titles and management options within Admin > Manage Courses.
  • Added the option to redirect users to an external course website for a course if one has been configured in Course Setup.
  • Added the ability to select multiple users for all “course roles” within Course Setup (i.e. Course Directors, Curriculum Coordinators, Associated Faculty, Program Coordinator, Evaluation Rep, Student Rep, and Teacher Assistant).
  • Added the ability to indicate “Program Level Objectives” for the AAMC Curriculum Inventory Portal export.
  • Added the optional concept of Learning Tracks to an organization. This concept allows Courses to be included with one or more Learning Tracks.
  • Added the ability to indicate whether the attendance at a Learning Event is Optional or Required.
  • Ability to limit displaying menu items to certain groups of users.
  • We now allow the @ symbol in usernames to support logging in with e-mail addresses.
  • Statistics table mining now supports IMS Caliper; however, using the xAPI is support recommended.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact us.

Entrada ME 1.7.5 Released

Carina Nebula

Queen’s University is celebrating its 175th anniversary and to recognize this tremendous event the Entrada Project team at Queen’s University, University of Calgary, UCLA, University of Ottawa, Rush University, and University of British Columbia is pleased to name our latest release Entrada 1.7.5 in honour of the occasion.

Entrada began at Queen’s University in 2004 within the School of Medicine under the deanship of Dr. David Walker and directorship of Dr. Benjamin Chen. It has since matured and expanded into the only platform capable of supporting Medical Education from Undergraduate Admissions through to Continuing Professional Development.

Consortium partners and staff can download Entrada ME 1.7.5 Consortium Edition from our private project repository. The general public can download the Open Edition by clicking the Download link at the top of the page, or by visiting our public GitHub project repository.

This release includes over 59 enhancements, fixes, and refinements that focus primarily on stability and user experience. Here is some of what is new:

  • Enhancements to Learning Event Type selector when managing Learning Events.
  • Added the ability to do granular audience scheduling within a Learning Event. You can now schedule different times for different audience members.
  • Added the ability for Course Directors to export Learning Events.
  • Added Shibboleth Authentication support as another SSO option.
  • Refactored single sign-on code to better support both CAS and Shibboleth.
  • Enhancements and fixes for the Manage Users module.
  • Enhancements for selecting and adding users in Manage Cohorts and Community Members areas.
  • Added xAPI / Experience API / Tin Can support to Entrada (PHP 5.4+)

Communities

  • Detailed polishing and fixes within many Community modules and templates.
  • Added substantial flexibility for permissions in Discussion Forums, Document Sharing, etc in Communities. They can now be limited to specific small groups within a Course.
  • Added the ability to attach files to Discussion Forum posts in Communities.
  • Added the ability to add links, HTML, and folder hierarchy to the Document Sharing module in Communities.
  • Greatly improved the Quizzes module in Communities.

Developers

  • Updated the Weather Widget to use Yahoo’s new API.
  • Entrada dependencies are now managed using Composer.
  • Added 2 letter, 3 letter, and numeric ISO country codes for greater flexibility.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact us.

Entrada Conf 2016

CN Tower

Attention Entrada contributors! Join us on Tuesday, May 31st, 2016 for Entrada Conf 2016. This year Entrada Conf is taking place in beautiful Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the unique and innovative “Think-Site” space.

Location

Think-Site is located one block west of Spadina on Richmond Street West. Located in the Starwood building, it is steps away from the eclectic core of Queen Street West and the urban chic of King Street West.

Schedule

  • 9:00AM: Breakfast, Introductions, and Welcome
  • 9:30AM: School Tour – (East to West) 15 minute Entrada walk through from each school
  • 11:00AM-12:00PM: Group Discussion on PHP Frameworks and “Entrada 2.0”
  • 12:00PM-1:00PM: Lunch
  • 1:00PM-2:00PM: Roadmap development for 2016/2017
  • 2:00PM-2:45PM: Gitting It Right – Development Workflow
  • 2:45PM-3:00PM: Break
  • 3:00PM-3:45PM: Shipping Entrada in Containers (Docker et la)
  • 3:45PM-4:30PM: Load Testing Entrada
  • 4:30PM-5:15PM: Entrada Approach to Unit Testing
  • 7:00PM: Dinner and Drinks

Speakers

  • Zhen Gu
  • Jim Cassidy
  • Geoff Harvey
  • Matt Simpson

Registration is now over; however, if you have specific questions or would like clarification regarding information contained in this post please contact us.

Entrada ME 1.6.1 Released

Space Galaxy

The Entrada project team is pleased to announce the release of Entrada ME 1.6.1. This release is the first version to use the ME branding as part of our Entrada Platform. Entrada ME 1.6.1 focuses primarily on refinements and improvements, as well as updating core components, introducing all new Community templates, and an enhanced Curriculum Search engine.

It is also important to note that we now have two versions of Entrada ME: the Open Edition, and Consortium Edition. The majority of our development activity is now completed within our private consortium source code repository and only features intended for the public are brought into our Open Edition repository. For more information about the Consortium, please contact us.

You can download the Open Edition of Entrada ME 1.6.1 simply by clicking the Download link at the top of the page, or by visiting our GitHub source code repository.

What’s New?

  1. New Curriculum tool called Curriculum Matrix, which accompanies the already robust Curriculum Explorer and Search tools.
  2. Greatly enhanced and refined Curriculum Search engine, which now includes mapped Course and Learning Event objectives in the search results.
  3. Change the order of Resources attached to Learning Events (to Before Class, During Class, After Class, No Timeframe).
  4. All Learning Event Resources are now included in the Teaching Reminder e-mail notifications.
  5. Ability for faculty to decide when and if Objectives mapped to Learning Events are visible to Learners.
  6. New interface that will allow administrators to manage Assessment Characteristics for their organization within System Settings.
  7. New interface for viewing and managing Course Enrolment for course directors.
  8. Ability for course directors and administrators to copy Assessments from year to year, which reduces data entry and error.
  9. Over 35 other various bugs and issues were resolved.

Communities

  1. All new Community templates, including a new Default template.
  2. Community RSS and Calendar feeds are now available with the Private URL support, which makes them accessible to Google Calendar.
  3. Removed the seldom used “Community Registration” option when creating a new community.

Developers

  1. Added the Google API Client Library for PHP to replace Zend_Gdata. This library manages the Entrada Google Hosted Apps integration.
  2. FontAwesome is now included with Entrada, which provides hundreds of great glyph icons.
  3. Entrada CLI, which is used to create, apply, and audit database migrations (changes).
  4. Introduction of Entrada_Settings class to manage application and organizational specific settings.
  5. Many internal components were upgraded including Zend Framework 1.12.17, CKEditor v4.5.5, Smarty v3.1.24

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact contact us.

Entrada Becomes Entrada Platform

The Entrada Project has been actively developing Entrada for nearly eight years now, and today, as a result of the enthusiasm and hard work of dozens of people from five North American Medical Schools, we would like to announce Entrada Platform™.

Entrada Platform is a consistent and integrated suite of software designed to serve the needs of Medical Schools and other Health Sciences Faculties (Dentistry, Nursing, Rehabilitation Therapy, Veterinary Medicine, etc) from Undergraduate Admissions, to Undergraduate Medical Education, Postgraduate / Graduate Medical Education, through to Continuing Professional Development.

In essence we have built a flexible suite of software capable of supporting physician education from the time they apply to Medical school through to career retirement.

The Entrada Platform consists of three major components that can be installed entirely separately, or work together to deliver the whole experience:

  • Entrada Admissions
  • Entrada ME
  • Entrada CPD

Each of these components is built upon the open source Entrada Core, but they each contain a series of consortium licensed (less open) modules that are specific to the purpose.

Today we are announcing the release of three packages, with more information on each to follow shortly:

  1. Entrada ME 1.6.1 Open Edition
  2. Entrada ME 1.6.1 Consortium Edition
  3. Entrada CPD 1.0 Consortium Edition

The last component (Entrada Admissions) has been developed for Queen’s University Undergraduate Medical Education, and will be refactored and made available to Consortium members as soon as possible.

We have a number of exciting announcements coming up in the next little while, so please stay tuned.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact us.

Entrada Developers Choose PhpStorm

PhpStorm LogoThe Entrada development team has selected PhpStorm by JetBrains as the officially sanctioned and recommended Integrated Development Environment for doing PHP development related to the Entrada Platform. For nearly two years, PhpStorm has provided the developers of our Open Source software with a reliable and feature rich IDE that sees continuous enhancements and improvements. Thank you to JetBrains for providing us with this.

Conflict of Interest Declaration: Due to the fact that Entrada is licensed under GPLv3, and in exchange for posting an entirely true statement about our development team’s experience using PhpStorm, JetBrains has granted our developers a no-cost license for the use of PhpStorm. For more information on PhpStorm, please visit the JetBrains website.

Welcome University of Ottawa

It is our pleasure to formally announce that the Entrada Community Partner family has once again grown.

The University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine is one of the foremost medical schools in Canada, providing learners with the opportunity to study in both English and French languages. uOttawa has joined the Entrada Consortium and the process of implementing Entrada ME (Undergraduate and Postgraduate), and Entrada CPD (Continuing Education) is well under way.

The uOttawa MedTech team has been outstanding in the process already, and will be an integral part of Entrada developer community going forward.

On behalf of the entire Entrada community, welcome University of Ottawa.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this announcement please contact us.

Exploring Entrada Video Released

Would you like a better picture of the entire Entrada ecosystem? We have created a 5 minute video called “Exploring Entrada” that clearly illustrates what Entrada is all about, and what it can do for your organization.

This video was originally developed for a symposium presentation called “Curriculum Management Systems for Competency-Based Programs” at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (April, 2015).

Also look for us at AAMC GIR Conference (June, 2015), and AAMC Conference (November, 2015). We will see you there!

You can also see this on Vimeo.

Special Thank-You to Chris Hartjes

The Entrada development team would like to thank Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) for sharing his wonderful PHP unit testing expertise with some of our team on Friday, November 7th at True North PHP. His time and expertise were greatly appreciated as we further develop unit testing practices and procedures within the Entrada platform.

Entrada 1.6.0 Now Available

The Entrada project team is pleased to announce the release of Entrada version 1.6.0. This newest release includes some very exciting new features, and significant refinements to some existing features, further empowering our users within Entrada. I would like to thank each of our Entrada Community Partners for your extensive contributions to this release.

What’s New?

In addition to many user interface and user experience improvements to existing areas within Entrada you will find the following platform enhancements:

AAMC Curriculum Inventory Reporting

As part of our commitment to developing a highly flexible, interoperable and robust integrated teaching and learning environment we have added the ability to export the curriculum within Entrada to the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory data standard (ANSI/MEDBIQ CI.10.1-2013). This XML formatted export allows you seamlessly upload your curriculum to the AAMC Curriculum Inventory Portal. This exciting feature is available to Entrada Community Partners as part of consortium membership. For more information on using or obtaining this feature, please contact us.

Recurring Learning Events

Creating repeating events within Entrada just became a whole lot easier thanks to the new ability to schedule recurring Learning Events. This powerful feature enables you to create daily, weekly, or monthly recurring Learning Events with a variety of advanced options. Updating content within these recurring events can be done at high level or a very granular level, empowering you to leverage your recurring events without being handcuffed by cascading changes that you didn’t want to make.

Synchronize Course Enrolment

Having course enrolment synchronized with your institution’s Student Information System was previously possible within Entrada through the use of a scheduled script. However, thanks to a new feature, administrators and course directors can now synchronize on-demand to get students into their courses without any waiting.

Synchronize Small Groups

In addition to being able to synchronize course enrolment on the fly you can now synchronize small groups for a course. This feature will detect if there are any small groups already being maintained within your Student Information System and if any groups are found the group structure will be duplicated, synchronized and maintained within Entrada automatically.

Learner Activity and Statistical Information

This new feature gives administrators and faculty members the ability to see how many of their learners have accessed the learning event and it’s material. These statistics and history can then be used to identify which learning events are being accessed less than other events so that action can be taken to improve the quality of these events, and the learning material associated with them.

BasicLTI Integration

Our continuing effort to increase the interoperability of Entrada with third-party learning tools has brought us to add BasicLTI Consumer support to Entrada. System administrators and faculty members can now connect to external BasicLTI Providers through the Course Website / Community system, as well as through Learning Events. This feature works great for connecting to Library systems, Publisher platforms, and external learning tools.

MeSH Keywords Support

Administrators and faculty members now have the ability to link MeSH keywords to both Courses and Learning Events within Entrada. This important features allows for impressive reports that demonstrate where exactly linked MeSH keywords are taught throughout your entire curriculum.

Clinical Encounter Logging Enhancements

Entrada Mobile now allows learners to log clinical encounters easily and efficiently from within the mobile app (available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry 10). This feature gives your learners the freedom to enter what they learn on the fly while it is fresh in their minds.

Quiz Module Question Grouping

When attaching quizzes to Learning Events or Course Websites, faculty members can have the option to randomize the questions within the quiz. In most scenarios this feature has worked very well, except for when certain quiz questions needed to be grouped together. The perfect example of this presented itself when a quiz had case based questions in it and those questions needed to remain in sequence. Randomizing such a quiz would move case based questions in with other random quiz questions resulting in a question sequence that did not make sense. Now when authoring a quiz, faculty members can group those sets of questions together, while still having the benefits of randomizing the overall quiz.

First Time Login Terms of Use / Copyright Agreement

System administrators can now configure Entrada to require users to accept a terms of use or copyright agreement, along with attesting that any material uploaded does not violate any copyright laws. This feature ensures that all users have acknowledged that their use of the system is bound by institutional policy.

Course Specific Learning Event Calendars

Faculty, staff, and students can subscribe to their own activity-based Entrada calendar, or they can subscribe to specific calendars for specific courses. Providing Entrada users with even more ways to view and manage their schedules.

Linking Gradebook Assessments to Learning Events

Included in Entrada 1.6 is the ability to link assessments to learning events. This feature allows you to maintain linkages across your whole curriculum; linking assessments to events, events to courses and curriculum objectives to all four. This provides you with a powerful tool for tracking and reporting on your curriculum in both how it is delivered and how it is assessed.

Learning Event Draft Schedule Import Enhancements

Importing Learning Events into Entrada just got easier. The CSV import tool now allows administrators and faculty members to import Comma Separated Values (CSV) data in any column order they wish. The new column mapping feature then allows you to map required and non-required Entrada fields to the columns in your file.

Gradebook Assignment Dashboard Notices

When attaching an Assignment Dropbox to a Gradebook Assessment administrators and faculty members now have the option of automatically notify the affected learners through a Dashboard Notice.

Default Community Template Facelift

Entrada communities just got a whole new look and feel thanks to the redesigned default template. The redesigned template gives your community a sleek more modern look and feel while making the user experience that much more enjoyable. Entrada 1.6 also allows for media to be embedded within announcements, discussion posts, and more.

Developers Rejoice

As part of the Entrada 1.6 release we have upgraded many of the internal components that make Entrada tick, such as Zend Framework, ADOdb, CKEditor, HTMLPurifier, Smarty, etc. This makes working within Entrada a breeze for developers looking to leverage new features within these components.

For more detailed information on any of these features you can go through the closed Issues for the 1.6.0 Milestone on GitHub.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University
Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
E-Mail:[email protected]

A New Entrada – Entrada 1.5.1

A new community partner, a new collaborative software development platform, and a fancy new Entrada software release. Welcome to Entrada 1.5.1.

Welcome David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

We are pleased to officially announce that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has joined the Entrada consortium as our 4th official Entrada Community Partner. With the help of their focused and driven software developers, not to mention feedback from their world renowned medical educators, we have already seen great contributions from them to Entrada software. Thank-you, welcome, and we are very excited to be working with you.

Entrada on GitHub

In our continuing efforts to improve project collaboration, visibility, and efficiency we have moved and consolidated our software development management into the world’s largest open source community, GitHub. GitHub’s robust platform now powers our code management, issue management, and documentation wiki. Fork us on GitHub!

Entrada 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 Released

It is with great pleasure that the Entrada development community announces the immediate availability of Entrada 1.5.1 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

Entrada 1.5.0 was released in July but never received a proper release announcement on our website. This release announcement will therefore cover new and modified features in both versions of Entrada.

  • Entrada Mobile 1.5 (iOS, Android, and BlackBerry 10 compatible)
  • Newly redesigned Entrada interface utilizing Twitter Bootstrap and HTML5
  • New ability to explore and browse the mapped curriculum with Curriculum Explorer
  • New ability for learners to submit, and staff / faculty to approve observership requests
  • New ability for learners to maintain a clinical encounter log book
  • Streamlined message centre for students that replaced dashboard notices
  • Significantly improved objective set management at the organizational level
  • Significantly improved curriculum mapping interface at course, learning event, and assessment level
  • Significantly improved user and administrative sides of clerkship management
  • Streamlined attendance tracking for learning events
  • Streamlined course gradebook and assignment dropbox functionality
  • Streamlined ability to synchronize class lists with centrally provided LDAP information
  • Ability to add descriptive text, page breaks, and question randomization to quizzes
  • Ability to select the fields that are included when exporting learning events
  • Ability to add custom user profile fields for users in certain departments
  • Ability to time release objectives within learning events
  • Ability to record late submissions and resubmissions for assessments
  • Ability to create “public notices” that appear on the Entrada login page
  • New integrated rich text editor for better end-user experience
  • Increased password hash security
  • Removed unmaintained Tasks module
  • Removed old documentation, unit tests, and unmaintained developer tools

For more information on any of these features you can go through the closed issues for 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 on GitHub. Please be advised that the 1.5.0 release took place during the transition to GitHub so some new features / issues may not be documented here.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
E-Mail: [email protected]

Entrada 1.4.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development community is pleased to announce the availability of Entrada 1.4.0 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

This release introduces many new features, enhancements, and over all improvements to the platform including:

  • Entrada Mobile 1.1 for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry + Playbook
  • Ability to create draft schedules for Learning Events.
  • Ability to import CSV files of Learning Events into a new draft.
  • Ability to take attendance (including Kiosk Mode for student card swiping).
  • Ability to filter Learning Events by Department (based on department of associated teachers).
  • Ability to see the history of a particular Learning Event (who add / edited / delete what from Event Content).
  • Hot Topics are now displayed to students in the Student View of Learning Events page.
  • Ability to randomize question order (in addition to response order) in Quizzes.
  • Ability to automatically import grades from a Quiz to a Gradebook Assessment.
  • Ability to see which users selected what response on Quiz results page.
  • Entrada Users can now have multiple groups and roles, and even belong to multiple Organisations.
  • Ability to Manage Departments from System Settings
  • Usability enhancements to the Manage Community Members section.
  • Ability to upload multiple files at once to a Community.
  • Significant improvements to the Evaluation and Assessment tools in Entrada including:
    • E-mail notification to evaluators of evaluations they must complete.
    • Ability for faculty to assess learners.
    • Ability for learners to assess themselves.
    • Ability for learners to assess their peers.
    • Faculty members can now view the results of evaluations that have been done on them.
    • Course Directors can now see evaluation reports of their courses.

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.4.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.4.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.3.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Entrada 1.3.0 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

This release introduces several new features, and over a hundred fixes and other various enhancements including:

  • Better multi-organisation support to allow more than one institution to co-exist within the same Entrada installation.
  • Addition of a System Settings module that allows administrators to manage organisations, and many of the data lookup tables like Curriculum Types, Event Types, Hot Topics, Meta Data, and Objectives.
  • A new assignment system within the Gradebook to facilitate handing in, marking, and returning assignments to learners.
  • Ability to select from multiple templates when you are creating or updating a community.
  • Ability to export Learning Events from the Manage Events section.
  • Ability to select the encryption method you would like the authentication client / server to use.

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.3.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.3.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.3.0 Beta 1 Available

We are pleased to announce the Entrada 1.3.0 Beta 1 is now available in the beta-1.3.0 branch of the Entrada Git repository. Our testing is very nearly finished, and we hope to provide an Entrada 1.3.0 final release on Tuesday, April 10th.

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.2.0.1 Minor Release

The Entrada development team has now released Entrada 1.2.0.1. This minor release primarily resolves an issue with the initial database installation, an issue with deployment on Windows servers, and some minor Internet Explorer 8+ incompatibilities. We have also taken steps to prepare for the upcoming Entrada 1.3 release in a few months.

Entrada 1.2.0.1 can be downloaded from the downloads page of our website or by cloning theGit master branch. For a full list of fixes and enhancements please review the Entrada 1.2.0.1 Roadmap.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.2.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce the release of Entrada 1.2.0, which is available now from the Entrada downloads page and Git master branch. While new features, existing feature enhancements, and of course bug fixes are often highly anticipated in new releases we would like to take a moment to praise the optimization work that has gone into the 1.2 release. At least a few developers have spent time examining slower areas of the application, and speeding it up significantly by doing code and database query optimization.

In addition to the optimization work that has taken place for this release, we have a number of new features and enhancements to highlight as well:

  • Ability to add complex meta-data to user profiles. (i.e. immunization records, etc.)
  • A new Evaluation module to handle course and teacher evaluation.
  • A new “Hot Topic” tagging feature for learning events.
  • New event type reports that display the different methods of teaching going on in the curriculum.
  • A new developer tool that gives administrators the ability remark completed quizzes.
  • Added support of faculty to view their teaching schedule via iCalendar feeds.
  • Ability to copy existing learning events.
  • Ability to attach quizzes to an existing community.
  • Ability for learners to see their assignment marks via the grade book.
  • A number of enhancements to the tasks module.
  • Extended support for student roles.
  • Increased speed and optimization throughout Entrada.

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.2.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.2.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.1.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Entrada 1.1.0, the much anticipated successor to our first open source release from May, 2010. Entrada 1.1 contains many new features, and a myriad of enhancements and fixes including but not limited to:

  • A new module for Medical Student Performance Record (MSPR) management
  • A new module for regional education and learner accommodation management
  • A new module for faculty annual report generation
  • A new module to handle student grades via a grade book
  • Enhanced curriculum objective and clinical presentation management and mapping
  • A new module to handle tasks or todo list items for learners

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.1.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.1.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

New Developer Community Online

Today we have launched our new Entrada Developer Community, which will serve as both the community hub and project management system for the Entrada Project. There are still a few small glitches we have to workout (i.e. OpenID support currently does not work), but please feel free to register an account and contribute if you would like.

We have also switched our source control management to Git as of this morning. All existing developers were notified via e-mail, and any new developers or people interested in watching the project can do so by cloning our public Git repository. For more information on how we are using Git, please see the Entrada_Git_Repository page on the wiki.

Entrada 1.0.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team consisting of Queen’s University, Medical Education Technology Unit in collaboration with University of Calgary, Office of Undergraduate Medical Education, and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, is pleased to announce the release of the open source Entrada 1.0.0 teaching and learning platform. This important release marks the end of our internal development cycle and the beginning of what we are sure will become an open and vibrant community dedicated to enhancing teaching and learning through the use of technology.

To obtain Entrada 1.0.0 please visit the downloads section of our website, and for those of you who wish to follow our project milestones and progress please visit our Sourceforge projectwhere our Subversion repository and Trac system will be made available shortly.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada Poster Presentation at CCME

The Entrada team will be presenting a poster at this years Canadian Conference on Medical Education in St. John’s, Newfoundland titled “Entrada: Integrating Social Networking Within a Learning Management System Designed for Professional Education”. We will be doing a brief presentation on May 2nd between 2:00PM and 3:30PM, and there will be a dedicated poster session from 3:45PM until 4:45PM on May 3rd. We hope to see you there.

The official abstract is as follows:

Virtually all medical schools utilize some form of learning management system to deliver schedules and curricular content to their students, but these systems are often in private instances that do not facilitate the collaborative, humanities or leadership aspects of medical education. Over the past five years Queen’s University, Medical Education Technology Unit in collaboration with University of Calgary, Office of Undergraduate Medical Education has developed a novel and customizable integrated teaching and learning system called Entrada. In addition to curriculum and schedule management, Entrada incorporates social networking features that allow users to create and direct interactive communities for a wide range of activities, including over 200 such groups on interprofessional discussion, small group cases, student governance, and online learning modules across the two schools. Recently launched in the Schools of Rehabilitation Therapy and Nursing at Queen’s, Entrada can also be used to facilitate Interprofessional Education (IPE) by creating both communal and distinct virtual learning spaces for students enrolled in different programs. Newly released and upcoming features permit students and faculty to author and share quizzes, online cases, virtual patients, and aggregate library resources to support learning. Additionally, through the collaborative nature of the project, Entrada has created a culture of leadership in conceptualizing and realizing eLearning projects among IT groups. With the open source release, Entrada exemplifies leadership through sharing code with a global audience for the improvement of medical education through strong collaborative development.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 0.8.4 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8.4 release has been tagged in our subversion repository. This development release has several new features and fixes including, but not limited to:

  • New Clerkship Logbook Functionality: Clerkship students can now keep a detailed logbook of their clerkship experience from rotation-to-rotation, and administrators can easily review these logs and see when learners are missing key clinical experiences.
  • New Manage Core Clerkship Rotation Management: Clerkship administrators can now manage clerkship students’ core rotations in addition to the already existing clerkship elective management workflow.
  • New Student Dashboard Calendar: A new Javascript weekly calendar and custom ICS & JSON calendar feed is available for students from the Entrada student dashboard. This new calendar handles overlapping, individual and modified events very nicely.
  • New Entrada Community Notifications: Community members can now be notified via e-mail when something happens in a community they are a member of. More notification updates will be coming in subsequent releases; however, the notification support covers Announcements, Events, Photo Galleries, and Document Sharing modules.
  • Community Polling Updates: Community administrators can now add entire classes at once to the eligible poller list.
  • Lockout Policy Displays Attempts: Invalid login attempt count is now displayed on the login page so you don’t get locked out without knowing that it is going to happen.
  • Current Users Online: The list of currently online users should now be more accurate.

A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.4 milestones in Trac.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 0.8.3.1 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8.3.1 release has been tagged in our subversion repository, and has also been successfully deployed to the some local Entrada instances. This significant release is the result of the hard work of a number of individuals and collaborations, and it strongly represents the next step on our path to a 1.0 open source release.

Some of the newly introduced enhancements, although there are many more, include:

  • New Permission System: The permission system that handles all of the access controls within Entrada was re-developed using the powerful Zend_ACL component of Zend Framework. This is a great example of our continued commitment to move towards a full embrace of the open source Zend Framework.
  • New Learning Event Filtering Interface: A user friendly, highly functional Javascript multi-select interface was developed for the Learning Event filtering system. This new interface introduces find-as-you-type searches, filterable categories and more.
  • New Clerkship Electives Component: Clerkship students now have the ability to submit their electives for approval directly through Entrada. Once the pending elective has been approved through a configurable work flow, the elective appears to the student on their official Clerkship schedule.
  • Community Guest Users: Community administrators can now add guest users to their community who do not already have an account in the Entrada authentication system. These users will then only be granted access to the specific community.
  • Community Mailing Lists: Each community in Entrada can now create and manage their own community mailing list, which is powered by Google Hosted Apps. Mailing lists can be configured to be announcement only (messages accepted and sent only from Community administrators) or discussion lists (messages accepted and sent from any Community member).
  • Course Websites: Entrada Courses can now be “linked” to existing Entrada Communities, the result of which is a very powerful but easy to use content management system powering your course websites. This tight course / community integration also brings with it:
    • A new template for course website “communities” that looks like the default Entrada interface.
    • A consistent set of pre-defined pages that will make automatic syllabus generation possible.
    • A course calendar that automatically displays scheduled Learning Events from Entrada for the course.
    • Automatic administrator provisioning based on Course Directors, Curriculum Coordinators, etc.
  • Community RSS and iCalendar Feeds: Many of the Community modules including Announcements, Events, and Discussions, have RSS feeds available on a per-page basis in this release. In addition any Events pages also have an iCalendar (ICS) feed that allows community members to subscribe to the calendar in many calendaring applications (i.e. Apple’s iCalendar, Outlook, Sunbird, Google Calendar, etc) as well as other mobile devices.

A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.3 and 0.8.3.1 milestones in Trac.

Finally, I would like to give a special thank-you to Harry Brundage for his valuable development contributions this summer, and Dr. Lindsay Davidson of the REAL Project for providing his funding. Harry has been an important contributor to the Entrada team this past summer, and we look forward to his continued off-site presence while he attends McGill University. Also a special thank-you to Marta Majkut for her documentation contributions to the Entrada project over the summer, which will without a doubt be a useful resource to the Entrada user community for a long time.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 0.8.2 Release Announcement

Entrada 0.8.2 has just been tagged in our subversion repository and can now be merged into your local Entrada instances. If you are wondering what happened to version 0.8.1, well it just so happens that we finished both releases at roughly the same time so we decided to only tag the 0.8.2 release.

Entrada 0.8.2 resolves many known bugs, extends further compatibility to older versions of Internet Explorer, introduces the highly anticipated Quiz Module, and community Mailing Lists (via Google Hosted Apps), as well as gives community administrators the ability to add multiple quiz questions to a poll, to name a few.

A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.1 and 0.8.2 milestones in Trac.

Entrada 0.8 Release Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8 release has been tagged and is ready to be merged into your local Entrada instance. This release adds many new features including notification support for communities, new RSS and iCalendar support for the majority of community modules, ability to create multiple module pages with unique content with a community (i.e. 2 forum or announcement pages), support for creating and distributing electronic quizzes, significant changes to the people search module, many changes to the learning events tab, and more.

A full list of features and enhancements is available in the Entrada 0.8.0 milestone in Trac.

Entrada Developer Conference 2009

The first annual “Entrada Developer Conference” will be held at the University of Calgary from Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 1:00PM until Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 12:00PM. This first conference is a wrapper for our first face-to-face developer meeting, development day and “business meeting”.

Entrada 0.7.1 Release Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.7.1 release has been tagged and is ready to be merged into your local Entrada instance. This release adds a few new features, and fixes several bugs on our way to the 0.8 release. A full list of features and enhancements is available in the Entrada 0.7.1 milestone in Trac.