Excerpt from Columbia Health Science Strategic Plan October 2002 Volume I,
Academic Planning Reports, Education (p.29-30)*

Support for Teaching, Assessment, and Innovation

Teaching at Columbia should be informed by contemporary concepts of learning, best practices in pedagogy, appropriate technological support, and constant evaluation of content, teaching, and performance. Most teaching faculty have no training in educational methods, and it is extremely difficult for them to develop and improve teaching methods, materials and resources. Many expressed the desire for an entity that would provide "one stop shopping" to help with the development and evaluation of course materials. The committee believes this can best be done through a an entity that would provide:

• Logistical support: Centralized scheduling, audiovisual and technology support, printing, and presentations.



• Pedagogical assistance: Curriculum design, help with presentation skills and approaches. This should be accomplished by consolidating (or better coordinating) the assistance now available through the Center for Education Research and Evaluation (CERE), the Curriculum Design Studio, the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, and the Biomedical Communications group, with clear oversight from a faculty advisory committee charged with overseeing overall quality and with setting priorities for university-funded projects.



• Technology: Use of simulators, simulations, robotics, mannequins, and virtual settings to teach and evaluate competencies as well as incorporation of information technology and science to achieve educational goals



• Assessment: Assessment of students, feedback to faculty on the effectiveness of their course design and presentation, and program evaluation focusing on the effectiveness of course design, implementation, and teaching, as well as the critical collection of data about long-term outcomes of the educational program. Skills and resources now available in the academic deans' offices, curriculum committees, and CERE need to be focused in a more purposeful way on student assessment. In particular, the committee strongly endorses immediate establishment of a clinical skills assessment facility.



• Education Research: Columbia should be exploring opportunities to apply research from the fields of educational and cognitive psychology to the development and evaluation of the utility of traditional and novel approaches to teaching. Program assessment is another important field of education research. A center along the lines of what is described here would provide a natural home for a small group of faculty interested in contributing to the body of scholarly work in these areas. Such a group would serve as an important resource for faculty and provide opportunities for them to explore and develop their interests in education.

As a first step, the committee recommends that the Dean appoint a working group to identify options for consolidating, improving, and making more accessible and efficient the educational resources now available to the faculty. High priority should be given to creating an infrastructure that would enable state-of-the art excellence in assessment and evaluation of student performance, including a Clinical Performance Assessment facility. Such a facility could be used to evaluate performance from the very beginning of clinical training through graduate and continuing medical education. It would be of immediate use for the schools of medicine, dentistry, and nursing, and the hospital. The ability to assess interviewing skills could be helpful for public health as well. Such a facility could also provide innovative ways of teaching students. Because of the importance of competency assessment in graduate medical education, and its imminent introduction into undergraduate assessment, it is important that this be undertaken as a joint University-Hospital initiative.

*Taken from http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/fischbach/splan.html