Provost Funds Pharmacy College Software Development

The Provost office announced its Provost Technology Innovation Award recipients earlier this month which included a project submitted by John Lawson, software applications developer for the James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy.

The award, in the amount of $94,259, will fund the expansion of "Skilluate – an online student evaluation system” to expand into UC Blue Ash and UC College of Nursing while furthering the development of the program. This new project will create a collaboration between the three colleges that will produce a product that the entire university can use.

"The support from the provost’s office will greatly allow us to pull in new resources to develop what has been on our brainstorming board into actual features and functions,” says John Lawson, the developer of Skilluate. "Our college has something that we felt could be shared across the university in many different environments. We’ll now be able to partner with Centogram, an outside application development company, to unleash our ideas that our colleges have come up with on how to upgrade Skilluate.”

The beginning of Skilluate goes back to 2011 when the Winkle College of Pharmacy developed a custom built application that integrated recording video sessions with online evaluations tied to them. The online evaluations replaced thousands of pieces of paper that the paper evaluations were producing.  The college set up 12 recording stations in two unique lab environments to capture patient counseling sessions along with sterile compounding sessions. In addition, the college found a use for the online evaluation tool while evaluating students during poster presentations.

Continued development to the program includes improved tablet based recording stations, migration of college video storage to  Kaltura (UC’s video management platform,) multiple camera recording support, and allowing outside evaluators to login to Skilluate.

"Our goal is that all colleges involved in this award can use the proven application that the College of Pharmacy has used to generate over 10,000 videos in Kaltura and over 15,000 online evaluations. Once the development is complete, any college at UC could implement Skilluate in their environment,” says Neil MacKinnon dean of the Winkle College of Pharmacy.

With the funds provided by the Provost Technology Innovation Award, the project will support over 1,200 students, 40 courses, and three total colleges. In addition, it will help consolidate current methods of recording and evaluating students into one single application. UC Blue Ash will use Skilluate to assist in their foreign language and sign language labs to increase the usage of their labs. College of Nursing will implement Skilluate to capture recordings from their mock interview sessions. The College of Pharmacy plans to upgrade their current hardware and work closely with the development of new features in the application.

Assisting on the project slated to be completed by Fall semester of 2017 will be:
John Lawson, software applications developer, Winkle College of Pharmacy
Michael Hegener, PharmD, assistant professor of pharmacy practice, Winkle College of Pharmacy
Matthew Rota, director of IT, College of Nursing and director, Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning
Dale Hofstetter, director of IT, UC Blue Ash
Deborah Page, department chair and associate professor, UC Blue Ash
Sheri Barksdale, assistant professor of American Sign Language (ASL), UC Blue Ash
Angie Woods, PhD, associate professor of Spanish, faculty director Foreign Language Lab, UC Blue Ash