It is with great pleasure that the Elentra Consortium announces the release of Elentra ME 1.13.0. This is a very special release; it’s the first Elentra-branded version of our ME product, the first release under our new Elentra Community License (ECL v1), and the first release we have managed using Jira and GitHub. A lot of work has been done behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood to make this transition from Entrada to Elentra happen, and this release represents a major milestone in our history.

Congratulations to the Elentra Consortium community and a special thank you to all of the people at each of the Consortium participating schools for expediting the necessary legal review required to make this release possible.

Elentra ME 1.13.0

Branding and Project Management (Elentra Core)

Entrada is now Elentra and this obvious branding change is now reflected in our user interface. The user interface update was relatively simple but under-the-hood we have changed our GitHub organization, git repositories, and even changed the way our dependencies are loaded into the application. We have also transitioned to Jira for project management and planning, which will help us organize and communicate changes to our Platform.

Software License has Changed (Elentra Consortium)

For over 10-years the Entrada Platform was licensed under GNU GPL v3, an Open Source software license. It has served our community extremely well, but no longer reflected how our Consortium operates. To address these changes, we have created the Elentra Community License (ECL v1), a community-source software license that provides our community with flexibility and rights to our source code, while protecting it from unauthorized distribution and intellectual property risks.

Enhancements to Curriculum Tracks (University of Ottawa)

The existing Curriculum Tracks feature allows schools to identify and tag tracks or streams within an Organization and associate Courses with one or more tracks. The University of Ottawa uses this feature to identify language streams (i.e. French and English), while Queen’s University uses this to articulate learning tracks (i.e. Infection Immunity and Inflammation, Molecular Basis of Biology, etc.)

Schools can now associate Curriculum Tracks with individual Users (Admin > Manage Users), and Assessment Forms (Admin > Assessment & Evaluation), in addition to Courses.

Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) improvements (Queen’s University)

In our on-going effort to improve and refine CBME support in Elentra ME, this release includes the following features and enhancements:

• Allows the Program Administrator to trigger both CBME and Generic Assessment Forms
• Ability for faculty members to view learner assessment feedback, including the ability to comment and “thumbs up” a response
• CBME Objectives for a Rotation are now copied forward when a rotation schedule is duplicated (i.e. EPA links and likelihood/priority rankings)
• An aggregated report is now accessible from the learner dashboard, which includes a per assessor completion count
• Competency Committee Members can now switch views of the EPA Encyclopedia for multiple programs
• Auto-population of Entrustment Question text is now enabled by default
• The Outstanding Tasks view for Program Administrators is now accessible from Admin > Assessment & Evaluation
• The “My Faculty” list is now accessible to Program Coordinators within Assessment & Evaluation

Learning Events in a Visual Calendar (Elentra Core)

There have been several requests over the years to display Learning Events in a visual calendar format for all users within the application as well as the traditional list view, so we are pleased to report that you can now display, and filter events in a calendar view on the Learning Events tab and within a Course Website.

Lecture Capture Integration (Elentra Core, University of Manitoba)

Most universities provide learners with the ability to watch recorded versions of their lectures. This feature is commonly known as Lecture Capture, and thanks to the support of the University of Manitoba, we now support the ability to integrate room-specific recording schedules with preexisting hardware capture devices that automatically record and upload the video to a preexisting streaming server/service. Once the video resides on the streaming server/service, it will be visible to users as a “Streaming Resource” within the Learning Event in Elentra ME.

Course Gradebook Enhancements (Elentra Core, Wright State University)

There have been several improvements, fixes, and refinements to the Course Gradebook in this release. Thanks to Wright State University, we have introduced the concept of Weighted Collections. Gradebook Assessments can be grouped together into Collections, which can now be weighted in relation to the Course, and automatically calculate the value of each Assessment within its Collection. For example, if you have a Course Gradebook Collection called “Quizzes” that is worth 10% of the overall Course grade, that Collection can now contain several Assessments (i.e. “Quiz #1” worth 10%, “Quiz #2” worth 70%, and “Quiz #3” worth 20%) that equal 100% of the Collection, but are weighted to only account for 10% of the whole Course.

We have also added the ability for Graders (regardless of their group, permission, or affiliation with the Course) to appropriately grade assigned Gradebook Assessments. Parts of this feature were missing and/or broken in previous releases, so we pleased to advise this is now functioning as expected.

Rebuilt Portfolio Module (Elentra Core)

The ePortfolio module available in previous releases of Elentra ME has been entirely replaced with an updated Portfolio module, built using Elentra JS and the Elentra API. The functionality of this rebuilt module is nearly equivalent to its predecessor, but the user interface and user experience for learners and administrators have been vastly improved.

Rebuilt Logbook Module beta (University of Arizona – Tucson, Elentra Core)

Presently Elentra ME has two separate encounter/procedure logging modules available for use depending on context, which has caused confusion and unnecessary complexity. We are resolving this under the umbrella of the Clinical Experience module by replacing all existing Logbook functionality with a new unified tool.

This beta version of the new Logbook module is directly integrated into each Course and supports course-specific logging requirements to be captured. Important work is on-going, such as detailed reporting information, which will be available within the Clinical Experience module in the next release of Elentra ME.

Technical Updates

Elentra JS v1.1.1

The development of Elentra JS is an important focus of the Elentra Consortium Core Team, and the 1.1 release is the first major update to our next-gen framework. Many important updates have been made in this milestone, but to summarize briefly:

• The EntradaJS namespace has been renamed to ElentraJS.
• The filesystem location of Elentra JS has moved to www-root/ejs within Elentra ME.
• Internationalization (i18n) Phase 1, which includes locales, string resources, language packs, and Elentra String Composition Language (ESCL).
• Plugins Phase 1, which includes creating a new plugin, configuring plugins to install in environment.js, loading configured plugins and installing configured plugins.
• Throttle, which is intended to ensure a given function is not executed more than once within a given period.
• Component Library enhancements, which provide most of the UI elements necessary to develop a responsive single-page module within the Elentra Platform.

Elentra API v1.2.4

The Laravel-based API is now loaded into Elentra ME (by default) using Private Packagist, which requires some modifications to your Capistrano deployment script, and your School-specific composer registration key. This version of the API utilizes Laravel 5.5, which is a long-term support (LTS) edition of Laravel that we will likely stay at until early 2020.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine, Queen’s University
Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]