What features should your new education management solution have?

Developing, implementing, and continuously improving your health professions education program pose significant administrative overhead. These processes require the collection, organization, and analysis of various curriculum data including data on course content, scheduling of learning activities and assessment, learner performance and feedback, and faculty and program evaluations. In a manner of speaking, a huge part of health science program administration is data management.

As you are undoubtedly aware, there are a number of turn-key data management solutions available in the market. However, your faculty and administrative staff need particular features that cater to the nuances of delivering a health science program. We recommend the following criteria of program management tools and data analytics features for your education management solution considerations.

Program management tools to look out for

Managing programs includes administrative activities that are integral to running your health science program. In evaluating the different solutions available, we suggest paying attention to the following functionalities:

1. Curriculum mapping. Curriculum mapping functionality for an overview of your program offerings, showing the alignment of goals, course objectives, instructional methods ans assessments are critical for measuring the success of your program and learning outcomes. You need a platform that provides both an overview of your entire program and a deep dive for detailed information on a specific course and its learning outcomes.
2. Scheduling. Successfully scheduling learner experiences is a balancing act where you assess your cohort’s needs according to where they are in the program and make sure that you have adequate teaching staff, facilities, and placements to match those needs. Your chosen platform should function like a central repository for scheduling, allowing you to leverage that schedule for assessment and performance measurement for scheduled courses and activities.
3. Different user permissions. Curriculum and program management requires collaboration between different staff and departments. You need a platform that enables collaboration while also assigning different individuals with the appropriate level of access to your data. For instance, you may want some faculty members to be able to make changes to your entire curriculum structure, while you may require input from other staff or learners on certain parts.
4. Assessment and grades. Having a platform where you can collate, calculate, and communicate the performances of your learners—including summative assessments like grades—is critical. It allows you to monitor the educational performance of any individual or an entire cohort and quickly identify any additional support or academic intervention learners need to succeed. Ideally, your chosen solution saves you time in accessing all these details efficiently.
5. Course and Faculty evaluation. Harness the power of learners’ and faculty feedback to improve your curriculum and program delivery. Your chosen platform should facilitate the collection and review of insights from different feedback loops and facilitate easy action for continuous quality improvement.

All of these functionalities are integrated in Acuity’s suite of tools for managing programs—One45. Alongside One45, other similar solutions available in the market include OASIS, MedHub, and Elentra. However, the game changer for leveraging your education data across systems with One45 Analytics powered by Acuity lies in its data warehouse and analytics capabilities.

Data analytics features for more efficient program review and improvement

Analytics allows you to simplify your curriculum review process and seamlessly implement a data-driven approach to continuous quality improvement. Following are some key data analytics features that our partners have used to make their operations more efficient:

1. Customized dashboards. Dashboards give you a “control tower” view of your program operations. They offer a visual summary of data trends that allow you to gauge things like learners’ performance and faculty effectiveness, among other metrics. Dashboards can be customized to reflect specific metrics that are evaluated during your accreditation cycle, making compliance to reporting requirements simple and easy.
2. Data integration. In our experience, program and curriculum data are often stored in multiple systems (e.g. LMS, SIS) and siloed spreadsheets. Manually hunting and copying over data from different platforms is not only time consuming, it can also be error-ridden. Our Analytics can connect with different systems your faculty may already be using, pulling data automatically and creating a central repository for all the information you need.
3. Data refresh every 24 hours. Program data is constantly being generated. To distill useful and actionable information from such data, you need a data analytics platform that continuously processes and integrates fresh data from multiple sources. Acuity’s data analytics tool has a 24-hour cycle that provides program and curriculum managers with valuable and up-to-date insights.

Want to learn more about how Acuity Insights’ program management and data analytics tools can work for your program? Start here and talk with our specialists today.