The Power of On-line Courses

Once again I am in the middle of my on-line teaching commitment for the UBC Certificate Course in Laboratory Quality Management, and once again, I am loving it.

When I graduated from medical school and residency, I enjoyed working as an Infectious Disease specialist because it created the opportunity for a 1-to-1 relationship with patients.  It was satisfying to provide service and care in a truly direct fashion.  

But as my career progressed and I became more engaged in the laboratory and infection control, I found that my opportunities for impact and decision influencing were on a wider level – groups of patients distributed over wards and institutions.  What I sacrificed in terms of satisfaction with direct patient contact I picked up with system influence.  

With proficiency testing, if the direct patient impact was even further away, the system influence was much broader and covered health authorities and provinces and countries, and I was addressing quality assessment, quality improvement and education all at the same time. And as time marched on the education component grew from critiques to newsletter articles, to international training.  And the level of satisfaction grew even larger. 

But with the Program Office and the Certificate Course, the interaction scale has a whole new dimension to the dynamic.  While there is another layer that separates the laboratorian from patients, and sense of connection is much greater because the amount of interaction with laboratorians is much more intense.  Often we are communicating on a daily basis about Quality and Education and Laboratory improvement with folks taking the course are from across Canada and around the world.  The intensity and intimacy combined with the level of system influence can almost seem overwhelming.  

Over the years it has become very rewarding to attend meetings in many places and have people come up to me and say, “You may not remember, but I participated in your course in 2008 (or whatever) and I want you to know that it opened up a whole new career path for me.  Thank you so much”.  In the first 2 months of this year, I have run into people in 3 meetings with this same story.  And then there are the people who have contacted me through Linked_in.

It is very satisfying to know that so many people are pleased they took the opportunity to learn about laboratory Quality through our course.  I almost feel like Mr. Chips, if you know who that was.  

Recently we have been approached to consider developing a companion course which would cover another whole set of Quality related concepts not covered in the first course.  It is an intriguing idea.  As the whole arena of medical laboratory Quality grows (Thank you Institute of Medicine and To Err is Human.  Thank you ISO 15189) the body of essential knowledge continues to expand.  This is not information that is addressed in medical residency, nor in health administration, nor in the traditional MBA.  Increasingly people want it and institutions need it.  

I don’t know if this is a career path for everybody.  But it is a great path for me.

Education Opportunities in Quality Management 2014

Education Opportunities in Quality Management - 2014

Adults learn in a variety of ways; some learn by individual reading from books or the internet, while others benefit from the shared experience of faculty and peer participation.  When it comes to learning about Medical Laboratory Quality Management there is always choice.

The UBC Certificate Course in Laboratory Quality Management provides a 21-week structured on-line virtual small group classroom experience with interested peers and committed faculty.  The course provides comprehensive learning with textbooks, international standards, structured presentations, discussion, assignments, quizzes, comprehensive examination. 

The course is intended for people with ongoing work experience associated with the medical (or veterinary) laboratory.

The course provides a broad curriculum that includes:

• ·        Standards and Quality Management
• ·        Regulatory Framework for Medical Laboratories including Safety and Risk Management
• ·        Costs of Poor Quality
• ·        Modern Tools for a Culture of Quality
• ·        Root Cause Analysis
• ·        Introduction to Lean and Six Sigma
• ·        Monitoring Quality

Ninety percent of participants consistently rate the course as Very Good or Excellent

POLQM is now accepting applications for January 2014.

For additional information visit www.POLQM.ca

Musings on Continuing Education in Quality

A common theme that comes up in this blog is Adult Education.  As a central thought I have read and observed that adults are not sponges, open to learning about everything.  Adults will learn what they want to learn provided that it is packaged in a way that they perceive suits their purpose and self-image.  Adult learners, despite their motivation are   very selfish.

There are so many choices these days; you can read a book or journal or go through an instruction manual or watch a video or attend a course or conference.  And of course there is the hunt-and-peck or trial-and-error approach of trying to figure it out through the process of self-exploration.  

I used to think that there were some natural divides that influenced how we try to learn.  Stereotypically men would might think would tend more towards solitary learning and women would tend more towards group learning, but what study there is on the subject does not bear that out.   Men and women use both forms of study, each for their own purposes, and each with their own degree of success.   

There are many types of information that can be picked up by reading a manual or journals, but in my experience the opportunities for failure are much greater than success.  If the writing is ambiguous or tedious, or if the conditions for reading are not perfect, or if you are distracted by multi-tasking or time urgency, the greatest probability is that the learning will be a struggle.

That is why I spend so much time on developing group opportunities for Continuing Education in Quality.

At the moment we are coming to the end of the first week in our on-line virtual classroom certificate course in Laboratory Quality Management, and it looks like this will be a successful year.  There is a lot of dialogue and discussion going on. 

Not everything is perfect; we are really struggling with a new on-line education platform that is not particularly intuitive or helpful.  I understand the pressures on companies to demonstrate their commitment to innovation, but I am not impressed when “New and Improved” turns out to be “just New”. Grumble …grumble.

As I have mentioned before I am also working on a number of on-site Quality Education opportunities to supplement the course.    

In April we will be hosting our 20th annual half-day Quality Seminar with the Canadian Association for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (CACMID) and the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada (AMMI Canada) in Quebec City and in October we will host our POLQM Quality Conference in Vancouver (see below).   Both these programs are coming along very well with strong subject content and high quality speakers.  

There are some obvious differences between on-line and on-site learning for adults.  On-line education, even in a group situation like our course, provides certain luxuries.  You can enjoy the group discussion and group learning but at the same time you can participate when you want to; for me after midnight works well.  You can have music or not, or sit in your underwear (provided that you don’t use Skype or You Tube!).  You can get up and walk away and come back an hour later and nobody knows.   You can even smoke.

On the other hand on-site learning provides a level of access and intimacy and connection that can never be truly paralleled by computer learning.  You can ask questions directly and make new contacts and create new opportunities.  As they say the real value of meetings is that you actually meet.   

As a education developer, my personal experience is that putting on a course of a conference or a seminar by-and-large all consume the same amount of time and energy and effort and money.  It is all in the preparation and detail.  The process of lining up topics and speakers and developing content is always more than you expect.  Regardless of format, each hour of content transfer takes about 10-12 hours of preparation time. If you think that you can do a credible job on less, you are probably wrong.  And more importantly if you thing you can do it all by yourself, you are definitely wrong; Education is absolutely a team sport.

For the bottom line is that we get engaged in continuing education activities because we see it as interesting and worthwhile and a lot of work and a lot of fun.  Making it all about Quality delivery makes it better.  

It is a noble endeavor.

Quality Education 2013

I have mentioned before about our Certificate Course in Laboratory Quality Management.   This course is about to start its eleventh season in January 2013.  It is an amazing course and one that I strongly recommend for people interested in laboratory quality to consider.  

You might say that I am biased, and you would definitely be right, but this is one situation where it is possible to be both biased and accurate at the same time.  

This course covers a lot that you would want and need a medical laboratory quality manager to know about.  The list is extensive and includes: everything from international standards, to Culture of Quality to Document Management, Continual Improvement and beyond.    You can see the list in the enclosed brochure below.

This is an on-line course, but is not your typical on-line course.  It is much more a hybid-course with all the convenience of being on-line, but still provides all the discipline and connectivity that a small group classroom experience provides.  There are conversations, discussions, assignments and quizzes and examinations. This is not like your usual college classroom lecture with 700-100 all sitting bored or sleeping in the lecture hall.  It is a group of 40, the perfect size for adult discussion.  

The course was primarily focussed on people who wanted to be medical laboratory Quality Managers.   Initially the course participants were medical laboratory technologists thinking of a career change.  Over time the audience has changed: today the course has pathologists and residents, scientists and investigators, technologists and administrators. 

The course is taught in English.

The course tuition is $1950 dollars, and I agree that may seem expensive.  But the course is 21 weeks long, and the tuition covers a broad library and access to many international standards.    Most students score the course very strongly as providing value.

Philip Crosby once wrote "Quality is Free", and I agree.  Unfortunately Quality Education does have to have a cost.

For further information go to www.POLQM.ca and click on “Course Description”.  To see what last year’s students said about the course, click on “Enter to view the student satisfaction survey for LQM 2012”