Project recognized as Semifinalist of the 2007 Microsoft Develop Without Borders challenge
Partner organization
Global Health Education Consortium (GHEC), founded in 1991, is a 501c3 nonprofit corporation and a consortium of about 60 US, Canadian and foreign medical and other health professional schools committed to improving global health education. The membership includes more than 350 faculties from these institutions. See this video interview with Tom Hall, executive director of GHEC to learn more about them. See also the full GuideStar report about GHEC and the GHEC website for more details.
Summary
Today, a physician in Houston is puzzled by a patient with a rare, Chinese disease. Tomorrow, a US medical intern faces a culture conflict in rural Bolivia. They were not trained for these new global realities. An Office-based platform will help health professionals around the world to collaborate and respond to this challenge.
Situation analysis
The increasing interconnectedness of the global population coupled with the threat of infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and avian flu present new demands to the traditional health education in the US and overseas. Moreover, initiatives like the Millennium Development Goals and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are relying on adequate numbers of well trained, culturally-sensitive and motivated health workers to be effective in meeting their goals. Most medical schools, however, lack today the sufficient faculty, course offerings and reading materials to adapt to these new conditions.
A group of health professionals and medical schools around the world is collaborating with the coordination of the Global Health Education Consortium (GHEC) to respond to this challenge. GHEC needs to coordinate the production, peer-review, distribution and consumption of the new curricula that will address the current deficiencies of the educational institutions and prepare the new type of health professionals demanded by the new global reality.
Solution
An Office system will enable the development, peer-review, consumption and user-generated enrichments of global health curricula to help schools and instructors engage, prepare and support a critical community of health workers to meet the new global health challenges.
Once qualified by GHEC, global health experts access the GHEC’s private SharePoint 2007 Dashboard to submit teaching modules they have authored with the help of a set of Office templates pre-designed and provided by GHEC. This GHEC Author Kit includes a PowerPoint template with tailored instructional and graphic design, a template form for the creation of quiz sets, and a Word document template for the publication of supplementary notes that complement the module contents.
Authors submit their teaching modules and SharePoint manages their peer-review by designated professionals, students and GHEC staff to certify their quality. Once approved by GHEC, the new content is published and distributed through a public website where instructors and students participate to support their instructional and learning processes, respectively.
Moreover, students and interns engaged in service-learning experiences in underserved communities in the US and around the world contribute and connect the expert content with their field experiences through SharePoint wikis, blog conversations and surveys. This enriches and updates the teaching modules and supports the GHEC user community at large in their challenge of responding effectively to the new demands of a global reality.
Logical Solution Architecture
Logical 2007 Microsoft Office System Architecture
The system architecture for the Global Health Education platform includes:
2007 Office System Technologies:
– .NET Framework 3.5
– SharePoint 2007
– SharePoint Designer 2007
– SharePoint Master Pages 2007
– SharePoint SDK
– Office SDK
– PowerPoint 2007
– WPF & Windows Presentation Foundation-everywhere
– XPS Document format
– PowerPoint to XAML
– Word 2007