HPE Course Offerings

This course provides an orientation to the entire MHPE Program – its mission, goals, and prototypical instructional methods of active and collaborative learning. It introduces each core course and key initial content for these courses, and provides an introduction to an important thread in the Program – completion of a thesis. Finally, it provides opportunities to meet faculty members, other students, and alumni, and to begin the process of becoming members of this community of leaders and scholars in health professions education.

Provides an orientation to the PhD program and to health professions education coursework. Additionally, provides an introduction to requisite skills necessary for success in a PhD Program.

This course provides a broad introduction to scholarship in health professions education (HPE), including types of scholarship, standards for scholarship, and the use of conceptual frameworks for developing educational policies, programs and research. Students practice planning the initial stages of a research project, and analyze appropriate uses for quantitative, qualitative, and survey research.

An introduction to the concepts, methods and issues of effective instruction and assessment in health professions education, including the examination of how effective instruction and assessment support student learning and faculty decision making.

Examines methods and issues in planning and evaluation of educational programs in the health professions, including how institutional and social forces affect planning and evaluation.

An introduction to theories of organizational behavior that may be applied to leadership/organizational dilemmas, as well as the development of practical experience and provision of tools for assessing, leading, and managing individual and organizational change in health professions contexts.

Introduction of students to a variety of techniques for analyzing behavioral science or educational data and provides hands-on experience performing these analyses with statistical software. Students will gain a sense of the breadth of techniques available for understanding and exploring relationships in data. The ulterior motive of the instructors is to free students from the tyranny of fear of quantitative analysis.

This course is designed to introduce students to the logic and practice of qualitative research. After discussing various theories of research design, we will examine several methods of qualitative data collection used by researchers in health professions education, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each, and talk about how social scientists decide which methods are appropriate for particular research questions and in particular research contexts. These methods include in-depth qualitative interviews, focus groups, participant observation/ethnography, and qualitative content analysis. We will also focus on how to analyze qualitative data once it has been collected. Finally, students will have the opportunity to practice these methods through in-class activities and homework assignments, and the coursework will culminate in the development of a proposal for a rigorous qualitative research study.

This course will focus on the basics of quantitative survey design, administration, scoring, and statistical analysis for use in research and evaluation settings. Topics include:

• Strengths and limitations of survey research methods
• Writing effective questionnaire/survey/rating scale items
• Designing survey research instruments
• Sampling
• Survey administration
• Collecting and analyzing data
• Validity
• Reliability/reproducibility
• Rreporting the results

The course emphasizes quantitative methods and does not cover qualitative survey methods.

Knowledge syntheses are powerful tools for synthesizing evidence to inform decision making. This course aims to provide learners with an understanding of the prevalent knowledge synthesis methodologies in health professions education (e.g., scoping reviews) and to equip them with the skills to conduct rigorous and replicable knowledge syntheses.  Using a topic of their choice, students will engage with the key components of a knowledge synthesis, including, but not limited to, defining a research question, developing search strategies, assembling a synthesis team, screening and selecting studies, and extracting data.

Students will have the opportunity to learn and practice both the skills needed to produce a research manuscript and a conceptual approach to writing that will carry over to future projects–research reports or other works of scholarship. Each student must bring to class a personal writing project based on a study with an already available data set that has been analyzed at least preliminarily. The topic of the study can be educational or clinical.

This course provides a hands-on experience writing an educational, non-research grant. Students will have the opportunity to create a grant application for a curriculum or evaluation project that matches their interests, and receive individualized feedback throughout the course.

This course is designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of quantitative methods and will build upon the foundation introduced by HPE 530 (Quantitative Methods).

This course is designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of qualitative methods and will build upon the foundation introduced by HPE 532 (Qualitative Methods). The purpose of this course is to deepen the breadth of the students’ skillset and knowledge necessary for the design, implementation, analysis, completion, and presentation of a qualitative study. Foci for this course may include (but are not limited to): (auto)ethnography, content (theme) analysis, (counter) narrative, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, dialogic analysis, phenomenological study, case study, participant and nonparticipant observation, and focus groups. Special attention will be paid to the process of analyzing data and discerning themes as they are revealed in the data. This course will further acclimate students to the language and practice of qualitative research and help them develop a critical posture capable of differentiating various ways of developing and executing qualitative research for the culmination of a qualitative research proposal. By the course’s end, students should be confident in their ability to explain and justify the methodological decisions of their study.

AI is poised to change the practice of the health professions, both in how clinical decisions are made and how patients interact with providers. HPE will be affected not only by changes in clinical practice, but also by new educational innovations it affords. The interaction between AI and humans in this context stands to emerge as a new phenomenon about which little is known, especially as new AI models and use cases evolve. This class will be a hands-on laboratory in which we apply an eclectic mix of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to define, characterize, and create new forms of AI-human interaction. Students will learn how to develop their own AI HPE applications, and will interact with each others’ AIs to co-create novel frameworks linking their experiences to theories of learning and practice. As such, the class will require synchronous sessions. No coding or quantitative prerequisites are required; qualitative skills are especially valued.

This course focuses on improving instructional skills in Health Professions.  Course topics include characteristics of effective teachers, learner-centered teaching in a range of health professions education settings, assessing and remediating learners, and making sense of teaching evaluations.

This course will review a select number of assessment methods for each of the CGME competencies and the CanMED roles, elaborate on the selection process of assessment methods according to the milestones, select competency milestones from a pool of items and map to specialty milestones. Participants will critically review the assessment methods used at their home institutions and prepare a blueprint reflecting innovations that they want to introduce. This course is very interactive and includes a number of individual and group presentations. The outcome of this course will be the preparation of a manuscript for publication according to guidelines that will be provided.

This course focuses on issues related to diversity in health professions education – diversity of students and of faculty; and diversity of disciplinary perspectives.

This course focuses on the role of health humanities in instruction and assessment in health sciences curricula. Disciplinary perspectives are drawn from literature/narrative, history, and ethics.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to deploying standardized patients (SPs) to enhance instruction and assessment in HPE. Students will write an SP case, train an SP to portray the case, pilot the case, design an instruction program, and develop assessment instruments based on their case.

This course provides an introduction to social science theories that focus on professional identity formation in leadership contexts. We explore: how leaders in the health professions learn the social norms associated with leadership; how these norms are affected by various identities, such as gender, race, nationality, disability, and clinical specialty; and the impact of these types of identities on inter-professional groups.

This seminar’s primary objectives are to review the theories upon which reflective practice is founded and to develop an educational module they could introduce to their home institutions. To that end, students will read selected literature by theorists and practitioners while engaging in numerous reflective practice exercises.

The purpose of this elective is to introduce the learners to the use of simulation technology in medical education. The scope is focused, not comprehensive, and addresses instruction and assessment at the level of individuals and teams. Participants are expected to design and present a clinical educational or assessment project that uses simulation technology.

Despite the prevalence of disability in the population (~20%) and in health care settings, education about disability is not a routine component of health professions curricula. Nor are people with disabilities proportionately represented in the health professions. As a result, health professionals are unusually susceptible to cultural bias and stigma, and often poorly informed about the health issues facing people with disabilities. This elective will discuss how to teach health professions students about the following topics:

• Conceptual frameworks for addressing disabilities in the health professions
• Disability in health care settings including ADA, language, universal design
• The effects of ignorance, negative attitudes and bias on medical decision-making and health care outcomes
• The critical role of learning from and incorporating people with disabilities
• Disability inclusion in the health professions (including reasonable accommodations, technical standards, and movement toward competencies)

This course will focus on the development of objective tests in HPE, specifically multiple choice tests. In addition to a review of the concepts of validity and reliability, the stages of systematic test development will be covered including writing MCQs that adhere to the principles of effective item writing, writing MCQs at higher taxonomic levels, setting performance standards, and interpreting test data based on classical test theory. Contemporary issues in testing such as computer adaptive testing, innovative item formats, and AI applications will be discussed.

This asynchronous on-line course will include weekly readings and assignments. Occasional on-line sessions, which will be optional, with the instructor will be scheduled.

As the title of the course suggest, there are various elements that go into composing persuasive writing – from a strong thesis statement and a well-reasoned argument to voice or tone and a “so what” – which is a reason for readers to keep reading, to be interested in what you’ve written.

Persuasiveness is important in all kinds of writing, from high-stakes projects like a thesis proposal, grant application, and an article to more common, everyday writing such as letters of recommendation and emails. We will look at all these different forms during the course and engage in various writing activities. Students are expected to come to class with a writing project, in any stage of development, that will be the focus of workshops and a final presentation.

This course focuses on policies and practice related to oversight for student assessment and progress in health science curricula.

This course addresses the implications of human cognition for instructional design in health profession education. It will involve a critical examination of research on expertise, expertise development, and instructional design.

This course explores interprofessional learning in the health professions using various educational frameworks and learning theories. Students will analyze the pedagogical approach of interprofessional education and its limitations. Students will evaluate their own professional context to identify opportunities to enhance interprofessional learning and overcome barriers at the micro, meso, and macro level.

This course explores assessment approaches not addressed in depth in MHPE 502, including standardized oral exams, the Key Features approach, situational judgment tests, programmatic assessment, assessment in mastery learning settings, and how assessment affects learning. The focus is on validity and threats to validity for each approach.