Tracking the Essentials: UAB Nursing’s Evolution Towards Transparent Student Learning

Alright. Well, hi, everyone. Thank you for coming up. My name is Joel Hernandez. I am the chief technology officer for Illumen. And before we get started, I just wanna follow-up on the morning presentation, keynote from Sharon.

In addition to what we're talking about today, we're taking a piece of this tool and embedding it into core canvas that all people who use campus outcomes can use the quality checker. So think of it as like Grammarly for learning outcomes. So we're very excited to be participating in that AI showcase. But I am very pleased to have with me, Matthew Jennings, Daniel Baker, and David House from the UAB School of Nursing. Say hi to that.

Thank you. And what we're gonna be talking about today is, skills based assessment, master based learning in nursing. The product we're talking about today is a brand new product. It's just coming out being released. It's a, very deep partnership between Illumoomin and Canvas.

It's a product built in the Canvas UI to do outcomes assessment. We're very excited about the possibilities that raises for faculty involvement in that activity, and and we'll be talking about the vision for nursing on that today. So as we get started, I kind of made an abstraction of a model of assessment for nursing, which is, you know, we have our program mission, our goals, we have our AACN standards, our program learning outcomes, some goals we have for the program. We'll curriculum map. We're gonna assess that learning.

We're gonna to direct measures, indirect measures like student surveys and and narratives, and we're gonna use those findings to rev the program. Look sort of familiar. And really our goal is to make Canvas the hub of that. So rather than going and doing it in other tools and spreadsheets, make that an emergent process of teaching and learning. So there is already in canvas.

If you've had canvas outcomes turned on, a rubric and the ability to gather evidence and have a discussion with the student, imagine making it possible for the faculty to have that same discussion at the second level. Right? So really taking the premise of teaching and learning, the premise of mastery based learning that you're a creditor wants you to go do and baking it into that course embedded process. Take the evidence and data and conversations out of that and let it support that second order curriculum or quality control this. And so whether it's clinical readiness accreditation, health care pathways, the key is to make sustainable the work. How many of you have tried to do a CBE program or badging program? Anyone? Got a couple hand one or two hands up.

Not easy. And so as these approaches become, in demand whether from your creditor or the workplace or in fact prospective students, we it's gotta become easier. With that, I will hand it off to the team. So, yes, I'm Matthew Jennings, the director for technology for the UAB School of Nursing. I am not a nurse.

So that that's always a question I do get is, is are you a nurse? And do you teach? And I'm like, no, I do not. I am the the subaccount admin for the the Canvas instance within within the university. Our program, we have just under three thousand students within the school of nursing. This information is just for the school of nursing, just over three hundred faculty and clinical adjuncts. Instructors.

We have fifteen programs. We're currently ranked in the number at number ten for our masters of nursing. Number team for our doctoral programs. I will say we we there was a question I had last time that I thought would be in important for me to add here. And, oh, our undergraduate is what I would probably call more blended, but they are in person.

So they are on campus. But they do utilize Canvas within their their in per in person courses. Our graduate programs are all what we call distance accessible because our nursing students are required to come to campus, few times throughout their program to demonstrate clinical skills But it is probably about ninety to ninety five percent online for the all of the graduate masters in doctoral programs. And then, we have several different accreditors, main one being CCNE, and using the AACN tools that we're just released is where we're focusing our work with, Illumina at this time. That's the first major hurdle once we get through that, then we will start at our program specific creditors to address outcomes within those programs.

Go ahead and go to the next slide. So about a year and a half ago, when did when did the AACN release the new essentials? Twenty twenty two. And I had a faculty member come to me and say, Hey, we wanna take these and make them and measure these essentials with inside of our courses. He and I started looking at outcomes inside a canvas, and we started looking at how to map those and build those out. And then I kinda got a halt as like, hey, there's still a lot of questions on exactly how we need to to handle these outcomes and how we need to measure it.

And so we kinda put a pause in it. And then About two months later, I was at the virtual unstructured Con, and saw the presentation, from Joel on a Luman and and what they were looking at and having some early adopters, to help them develop this product. And I knew we're looking at rewriting curriculum and rewriting our courses and aligning all of these things. And I was like, we need the mapping functionality. We need the outcomes.

This might be a great tool for us, to to buy in on and and look into. So as far as some conversations, we got a little further into that, and then I can allow my my faculty members here to kind of talk about a little bit more of the direction of what we're going on. We're still in that still in that lot. So the problem that we're solving. Mine was from a technical aspect.

They'll talk about it from the instructional, aspect. Well, hello. Welcome. My name is David House. I'm one of the associate professors, at UAB.

I teach in both the graduate and, doctoral, track or programs, I should say there. And you'll get to meet Daniel here in a second. But, are there any other faculty in the room? Couple? Okay. So as faculty, we know, one of the most challenging things is basically showing where our the progression of our students, where our students are at and where they're going. And nursing wise, there's been this huge change over the past couple of decades.

I mean, I've been in nursing for over twenty years. And what I learned roughly twenty years ago, the role of the nurse has expanded and and and actually taken on, more, responsibilities in healthcare, you know, we have nurse practitioners out there now that fill those roles where there aren't, you know, physician providers. And so It's it's because of all these changes, in our, need to put out a quality type of of be whether it's a nurse or a nurse practitioner. We have to, of course, you know, lead all the guidelines for through what the ANCC A a aACN. There's so many abbreviations in in the medical field.

I'm sure y'all can appreciate that. But with AACN, they came out with the essentials in course, essentials are the recommended guidelines for curriculum content and also for, competency. So We're moving to this competency based education, and we need a way to where we can track that, where we can track it not only individually within our courses, but across the program. So next slide, please. So, as Matthew mentioned, I mean, we use Canvas for all of our coursework, our communications for with our students, with other faculty, everything that we do, all of the coursework that we've built out for intervention courses is done within Canvas.

And so, what we need is we need a structure that we can scaffold all of these curriculum changes that we're starting to implement. And we're, like, a lot of universities were just at that stage to where insights is very timely because it's gonna help us build all of this out from the ground level up because currently right now we're going through a lot of curriculum revision We're reviewing and revising all of our course, overviews, all of the objectives. So, and we're not only doing this just with our courses, but we're doing it program wide. So, of course, that's a big undertaking. And we'll we'll kinda tie in this later, but, you know, in the keynote this morning, you know, when they were talking, you know, really what's important is data.

Right? All of our faculty want data. And, you know, and in the past, traditionally, you know, those nurses, it's like, do they pass the course? Yes. They go to the next course, then they pass that course, then hopefully when they graduate, they pass their certification exam or, like, their NCLEX. So that's where we're headed with all this. So here's Danielle.

She'll talk a little more. Hi. So, David does more of the graduate side. I a program director for an accelerated masters, but that's an entry level pathway. So I'm speaking for the traditional BSN, my program, and then also to are are in the BSN program.

And, the BSN program and my program, the AMMP, we're doing total like no more curriculum. Like, it's gone. We started over. So we have, you know, program outcomes that we've come up with, We just are doing a new program of study, and so we have to have new courses. And this is perfect time for this to happen.

So we can look at our, assignments and stuff and see if those really match the essentials that we have or what we or what we're supposed to have. And if we need to come up with new ones and how they fit in with our curriculum. So, I was late getting to Matt. I was like, I need, like an Excel spreadsheet to dump artifact in, you know, like, I don't know. And that's come up a lot because I'm a nurse, Matthew's instructional design, and then I don't this is a big gap to bridge.

So it's difficult to have conversations and come up with what we're really all talking about. So that's been, I think, the biggest challenge. But yeah, we're in the point where we're doing a total curriculum revision. And so I'm like, how do I show that my students have done x, y, and z, and they're competent, or they're getting there, or, like, they need more help, because that's one of the things we're tasked with, like, helping people get to where they need to be, but also maybe letting them skip forward. So we're really excited about having a way to track this.

What else am I supposed to say? Oh, that was student progression. So that's good. Yeah. And our goal and our goal is to have safe competent nurses. And so, you know, for the public safety, even if you're not in nursing or health care, you still want competent healthcare providers, I hope.

You can go to the next slide. Okay. So, I kinda hit on this a little bit, but we needed something across the curriculum. And it's currently frowned upon for us to, like it's almost like you're talking bad about a student, but that's not necessarily what it is. I need to know where a student is in the previous courses so I can know what holes I need to fill or what I need to do to have them where they need to be in the next course if they progressed.

And so hopefully, this will allow us to do that. We'll be able to see what they had, where they were. And then when they progress to the next course, then we'll have all that information. As a program director, I do know that, but, like, my faculty don't. And I'm not really supposed to tell them, you know, so that's always strange.

And then with the signature assignments, this is where we're gonna really work with the outcomes in canvas. And bridge those with insights. So we'll have, the ability to say if the students met their competency, or where they were or, you know, projected competency and keep track with that. And then hopefully we'll have the data to say, this is their projected, competency and that they were able to meet that as they progress through the program, and then they would be safe competent. Ready to be nurses because that's the most important thing.

And I think I think that was it. Yeah. Back to me. Okay. So, And and during throughout this whole process, of course, it's important to get buy in from faculty as well as the students because we want the students to also be able to see where they are.

Okay? I just don't have the slides in front of me. So That's okay. But, yeah, so Danielle, like she said, she's, she's more on the pre licensure and AMMP, and I'm more on the graduate side. And the the interesting thing about the essentials is there's two levels. There's the entry level and then the advanced level.

They kind of mirror each other, but there's subtle differences between them. And so, you know, having that data being able to analyze it, to be able to look for gaps across program is going to be essential to, you know, looking at that competency based education, making sure we're putting out competent nurses. And so you know, we're engaging faculty. We're coming up with, as we're building out all of this new curriculum, a structure or a framework such that we'll be able to track that, and then we want students to be able to look at that and be able to see where they are in their performance and where their name maybe needs to be a little bit of a backfill or, you know, that extra education to get them to where when they get closer to graduation, they'll be, you know, safe competent nurses when they enter the workforce. So But guess what else we have to do? We have to get all the faculty on board with this.

So that is how we, we are in on this. We're like, yes, we're the cheerleaders. And honestly, I'm not the greatest cheerleader. So thank y'all for picking me, though. But but I do realize that it's important to be able to track the student data and their performance and the outcomes that we need.

So I guess that's why they picked me. I'm like, we to know this stuff. We have to know everything about our students and how they're performing and like what their odds are of passing any exit, not exit from us, but like a licensure exam or a certification exam on his part. We have to know that they're safe to go into the hospital, and that has to be obvious. So right now, it feels like, I don't know if this is true or not, but it feels like if I Danielle say that they're fine, then they're just fine.

Like, that's that's pretty much how the standard is right now. So at least now we have, like, information. We have data. We can be like, no, they met this. And so, hopefully, the faculty will see that, and they'll be on board.

So that's my pitch. Y'all are nodding, so that's the one I'm gonna use for them. Alright. Well, thank you all. And and as Matt said, they came early to the process, like, a lot of it was still on paper.

So thank you for being with us during this design process. But it's very important to have, products built by practitioners in partnership with us, not in advance of it because if the people who are gonna use it don't tell you how it's supposed to work, you're not gonna do it right. So it's been really, we're very grateful with the work that that took. I know it's not always easy So, really, how many of you went to the keynote this morning? You saw the video that made me cry about the math student. Right? That's a great goal.

How many of your campuses are there yet? Yeah. So Right? We got some work to do. And and really, this product came. We've been partners with instructure since twenty fourteen. Largely in massive competency based in implementations and big community colleges.

And one of the challenges we've had over the years is faculty engagement. Launching LTI links to go do stuff in another app, finding your results in a link in the faculty portal just hard. Making those do the work that they're supposed to do is just difficult. So about a year and a half ago, some executives in IA Canvas said, well, what if we built it in Canvas? Great idea. And and so I'm just gonna talk a little bit about where that is.

You can actually come see it in action at our booth. But the main goal is basically Canvas outcomes is great for the course. You've got the rubric. You got the outcomes. You're collecting the evidence.

You get the learning master grade book. Connecting course to course and to the intentionality of curriculum and longitudinal data, demographic data, etcetera, a little bit harder. And so you know, really the goal here was to take what's already a pretty great tool for an instructional designer or a faculty member and make it good at that program level. And really what I say is to make continuous improvement truly continuous. Right? It's it's not truly continue.

It's not continuous improvement. We do that thing at the end of the year. It's capturing faculty discussions. There are self reflections on these assignments. Aggregating them against the data and the evidence to really make these initiatives more sustainable rather than we've gotta do a herculean effort even to get data.

So from a program assessment standpoint, you know, rich curriculum mapping, one of the things we try to do is make that as easier as hard as you wanna make it. So you can just click and say this is associated or you can say here's the assignment I wanna use. You know, from a planning perspective, one of the things our plan will let you do is just push the outcomes into canvas. Other ones will put the rubric in and set a target. So we really wanna be as flexible as you are, to this extent we can.

And then most importantly, and I think, you know, it's it's been said several times we built a faculty dashboard, for learning out because our legacy platform seven or eight years ago, and in many cases, faculty have to turn in data. They hear back from IR or the Dean two years from now. How engaged do you think they are when they don't know what their data meant for two years? Just not vary. And so a lot of our goal is to give dashboards even down to the faculty level. So it's a very important thing to us that transparency.

In terms of how we work with canvas. So the idea is we can take those things that you're aligning in your curriculum, those outcomes, those rubrics, stick them into canvas. Just use SpeedGrader. We don't have any UI outside of Canvas for most of the faculty stuff. There's one screen for faculty.

And then we pull that evidence and match your data back. So one of the things that was very important to us is for the faculty, we had one single button, the dashboard, and learning master grade book. Everything else is can So, that to us was a very important design principle when we were meeting with, design partners, with the instructor team, is all of the power of this has to happen under the hood. And for those coordinators, the rest of the people think they're using canvas. Because that means They're focused on doing the work they're doing, not giving you assessment stuff.

They're just using SpeedGrader, but they're giving you that assessment stuff. So that was a very important design criteria for us. So one of the things you could do is curriculum As I said, this does some fairly neat things compared to say the spreadsheet you use. One of them is tell where you're assessing in Canvas already. So if you there's assessment data aligned to a program learning outcome in the course, we show that in the curriculum map.

So it's a curriculum map that tells you whether actually you're doing the stuff in the curriculum map. Which we think will be very powerful for understanding. What do we say we're gonna collect? What are we actually collecting? More importantly. We now have dashboards where you can track who's doing their stuff. Who published an assignment linked to that outcome who actually assessed that outcome.

If we want to get a bunch of one year things for part of our nursing program, but also as part of our SEX QEP. I contract that we're on track to get that data in. So really important ability to understand what's happening, in your faculty. Finally, dashboards for coordinators and faculty. One of the things we've heard, talking to schools is Wouldn't it be great if I knew how I was gonna do on my accreditation report before I started to write it? Wouldn't it be great if the stuff that we do for accreditation was stuff we just did? And then we wrote a report about it.

Right? And so our goal is really to make the tool set here for those course captains, for those program coordinators, for those faculty, something where they don't have to wait for somebody to tell them how they're doing, they have control over it. And I think that's a that autonomy and that agency are really critical. So where are we in the program. So the product is just coming out. I think we've got about eight schools getting ready to come live or in some process of getting live.

So that's very exciting. Thank all of you for participating. Things we've learned along the way. I frankly am surprised by the number of people who are interested in sharing the student level mass You know, and I think if that video this morning of, imagine if your students knew where they were and what they had to go do next to succeed. That's a very powerful vision.

Other things we've learned is the conceptual challenges and and faculty development challenges around, well, wait a minute. I used to just people to come to a meeting every two years for assessment, and now it's part of their course. So there is some change management and rethinking of process that's required. So where we're going. I'm sure that this will not be a surprise in the middle of one of those to you.

So improved jury assessment for those of you who do it, more for SAC COC, necessarily than than CBE. New quizzes integration is coming. We're working with that team. So we'll be able to take the outcomes data from new quizzes into this. We're also talking to exam soft.

Canvas credentials integration. We just got certified on comprehensive learner records two and OBE three on Friday. So we'll be able to write to the passport they announced this morning. So any of the things that happen in here, you can set up rules for your curriculum. Finally, course coordinator roles for those big schools that have the massive enrollment things where they've got a lot of adjuncts and they wanna be able to manage, almost a course review as opposed a program review.

Before we go to questions, few more events. So we've got some webinars coming up. We'll actually be at CB Exchange with Instructure, talking about Canvas credentials in this. We'll be at SAC COC. With that.

I wanna open up for a little bit of questions and maybe I'll pass the mic to you guys because I hope most of the questions are for you. The faculty members, how how did this implementing from insights into your accreditation process? How did the faculty react do they do they understand better what y'all are doing with it? Did you change the culture of discussion about curriculum and outcomes and competencies? Repeat the question. Oh, wait. Me repeat. Okay.

Yeah. So they can hear and like. So you're asking about how our faculty are responding to the implementation of this. We're we're actually right now starting from scratch because the new essentials We are overhauling across all of our programs, all of our, curriculum content, our objectives. And so we're at those beginning stages to where we're just starting to, to build that foundation that we can, that we can then use across all of our programs.

So we haven't implemented yet. We have full backing of all of our administration with this process. And like Matthew said earlier, you know, Danielle's representing kind of half of the program You know, you are. And, I mean, from the faculty perspective, and I'm I'm at the the graduate and doctoral side of things. And so initial discussions that we've had in bringing everybody on board, everybody's for this.

They like the the, the, you know, they're excited about option of being able to have their own little dashboard and not, you know, from a course perspective, they can track things, but then across the whole program, those program directors, and then our administrators can look and find and identify those gaps Now, you asked about, credentialing. We went through credentialing, what, twenty nineteen Yeah. It was before COVID. So twenty nineteen, I believe, is when we got our new ten year credentialing. So we're good to twenty twenty nine.

I anticipate once we kind of get all of this in place, we'll probably go through that process again. And then as far as all the curriculum revisions, A timeline for that hasn't been set through all, like, the national organizations and by AACN. So, I mean, as of right now, our administration is backing this. The faculty that are involved with this are supportive of it because we understand the need for it. So that's a good question.

Thank you. And I'll add a little bit something to that. So Danielle and I were just in an undergraduate program meeting with the directors of the different programs and the and the leadership that is in the undergraduate. And I showed them this for the first time, to the leadership. I mean, a lot of them are on a task force that helping it.

So some of them it wasn't new to. And I think it was, got some pretty good responses that are really excited about a few things. But again, we're we're we are full transformation, we're in very early stages of rolling this out. We're we're still deciding on curriculum, like, how are these courses gonna go? Where are we gonna map these things? And so once that stuff starts getting set, we can then start plugging that in and actually applying it and pushing it out. This is a disclaimer.

We we have a lot of resources at our disposal and I don't know if you do or or not. But we have an entire office that is dedicated to evaluation. So right. So But what It's it's two and a half people. It's two and a half people, but he but But he they they're like, I need this, and then typically it falls to, like, me for my program to give that to them.

So it's usually like a back timed thing that I do. So I'm very excited about this because I feel like I'm one of the main ones to give information for accreditation. So if we can catch it on the front end, I'm really excited about it instead of like digging through stuff from like five years ago, because I've done that, you know, have like spreadsheets and it's awful. So that's what I just tell people. And people seem to be okay with my explanation.

So but I don't know if they've done it, right? They haven't had to dig through stuff and give pieces of paper to somebody from five years ago. So I don't know if they understand how important this is gonna be. So I will make sure to let them know. Put out anything so that each school doesn't have to go in and enter the essentials every time, or don't tell AACN, but we've already preloaded them. A scene in the house.

The, great question. They are among other professional creditors that we'll be talking about. It seems bonkers to me is somebody wearing my one end heck hat. So competency and academic standard exchange is one of my standards. If we can share standards, why wouldn't people use them more? So we'll see, But I do think, you know, and again, I'm almost stepping outside of even our our product realm.

I'm I'm on a lot of the committees with the t three competency committee from the chamber of commerce, one ed tech credential engine. And I think where we're going is that question of if I'm supposed to expect how my somebody asked me earlier today, if I had the solution to automated transfer and articulation agreement, And I said, no, I don't. I don't know how that would even work. But but it raises this question of as we expect people to have skills, what does that mean? There's four thousand institutions of higher ed. If I'm an employer, am I gonna go look for four thousand skills taxonomies? You know, so I think the people that make these standards and want us to build them into our curriculum, build them into our assessment, include them in our comprehensive learner record in my passport, If that's the way this is going, those associations have to share the standards because otherwise, I don't wanna mistype AACN in my comprehensive learner record.

It's a great question. Super quick. Yeah. Is there a student view of the dashboard? Great question. So, y'all went to the Sharon's keynote this morning.

Tell you my vision of how it's gonna work. So first of all, there is. There's the learning master grade book at the course level. Right? A lot of moving parts to that. What are they gonna do with Canvas credentials? What are they gonna do with pathways? What are they gonna do with Portfolium? My view is that we will write to those and or deep link to a page in those and that you'll have that pathway that Canvas, that CLR comprehensive learner record, learner experience record, whatever replaces the transcript with these skills based practices.

And we would author to it that would come in some canvas student portal thingy that came out of that effort, but but it's nascent. I don't have a guy from legal to run out and say forward looking statements in this presentation. But it is a good question. Right? And again, I think one of the things, I've been involved in everything from LTI and all these other tech standards that y'all know and love with your LMS. LTI sends back a value of percentage of the points from the assignment.

That's a long way away from you mastered three ACN essentials and here's the rubric I used. So We have program accreditation that also leads to a certification that they No. That's right. There's a lot of many of the professional creditors, especially anybody that has to lead to licensure. Those are creditors are now saying you can't leave unless you're ready for licensure.

And so the And wouldn't it be great for the student to track that? That's right. So so I think that's where, you know, we've been partners with Canvas credentials since it was Badger Pro. And that idea of a badge based pathway that's based on my having mastered these competencies and I I can see it. And I will say for those of our schools who have done competency based ed with us in Canvas on our our legacy platform, I'm not I don't have the the ESA certification for this efficacy, so you have to trust me. But our our big example of San Antonio College, they won the Aspen award for American Community College in twenty twenty one.

When they came to us, they had something like a nine percent five year graduation rate. And now it's like fifty four percent, and they won the Aspen award. And they will tell you that's because of the transparency of student when a student sees the rubric, what that rubric's gonna lead to before they get that assignment, they get the grade back. It's not just a grade. It's a rubric, and they know that that's a scaffolded curriculum.

They have an affordance to grab onto for that learning that's critical. I think the challenge in higher ed is the tool set to do in higher ed with that video showed this morning is still being built. We're helping to build it, but I I think that's critical. For y'all, for the panelists, outcomes, users, I have to use Canvas outcomes before insights came along, or is insights kind of now thriving. You are used to So the question for the recording, were we in outcomes using institution, prior to insights.

And the answer to that would be no. We were looking at it. I was in those early stages of looking at developing in outcomes when I was introduced to insights by a lumen. And at that point, I was like, well, let's since we're taking a pause, and I was told to kind of pause while some other things were being figured out on the outcomes. This kinda came in, and it was kind of a a perfect storm of timing and and synergy between the the two things.

And so we were not using outcomes. We had a few courses where the faculty had kind of gone in there and plugged in some of their core objectives and outcomes, but not very many, had done that. I think I really we only had two courses that had done that at this point? In terms of because y'all are the same regional accrediting agencies that we're in. Did y'all have any overlays with safe socks? Objectives with this do your standards that you have in here for nursing to those, for your nursing or credit, or to those meet your regional creditor also? Who? You me? Yeah. So I'm gonna try to sum up that question to the best of my understanding.

Wanna know if our regional accreditor Saks, OC, aligns up, up with that. And to be perfectly transparent, I have no clue. Kevin Keane in our in our evaluations office, he would be the person to tell you that. And so I wouldn't want to to tell you misinformation. I know that we I know he submits a packet when the university has to submit something for Saks.

I I don't know how that aligns necessarily with the AACN essentials that we're we're currently mapping towards. I don't think they match just from that packet spit up, but I could be wrong. I think if we're accredited by AACN, then that does go in that other, that regional accreditation, But, you know, the AACN essentials are are accreditation as much more nursing specific versus the university. Any other questions? Awesome. Thank you guys so much for coming.