On behalf of the Elentra community, I am incredibly pleased to announce the official release of Elentra ME 1.15.0. It has been a busy quarter for our development community, and this release represents a significant amount of work including 2563 commits, 269 Jira issues, code contributions from nine university teams, and is yet another huge step forward for the Elentra Platform.
For detailed release information, you can read our comprehensive What’s New in Elentra ME 1.15 change log or associated Jira Release page, but this announcement provides some of the exciting release highlights.
Clinical Experience > Lottery
Elentra Core
The Clinical Experience Lottery is a full-featured clinical rotation scheduling module, which allows learners to select and rank their preferred rotation order from available administrator-defined options. Once learners have completed the ranking process, a sophisticated algorithm then attempts to give each learner their most desirable rotation order based on availability, before automatically publishing the rotation schedule.
Clinical Experience > Granular Clinical Event Scheduling
WSU, Elentra Core
Once a rotation schedule has been published, the granular clinical event scheduling feature enables administrators to schedule each learner into clinical events within each rotation. This feature can be used for clinic scheduling, or scheduling any other type of non-didactic event that can occur within a rotation.
Case Management
KP, Elentra Core
The case management features in Elentra ME allow administrators to define clinical cases and connect relevant learning events together that may occur throughout many different courses. The “case of the week” is also displayed to the learners on their Dashboard, along with all of the relevant learning events.
User Interface for Managing Learner Levels
uManitoba
If your organization uses learner levels you now have the ability to set the level for each learner on a per-course basis. This feature can be used for such things as PGY levels in Residency or academic year in Undergraduate Medicine.
CBME and Assessment & Evaluation Enhancements
Queen’s, uOttawa, uToronto
The Assessment & Evaluation module is one of the largest and most sophisticated modules in the Elentra Platform and continues to benefit from continuous improvements and enhancements by consortium participants. Some of the highlights included in this release include:
- the ability to relate Curriculum Tracks to Distributions, Forms, Items, and Scales, and filter results based on the selected track (uOttawa);
- the ability to target specific Learning Events for evaluation (uOttawa);
- the ability to retire Forms and Items (uOttawa);
- enhancements to the ability to trigger assessment tasks to external assessors (Queen’s, uToronto);
- the ability to multi-select contextual variables within supervisor blueprint form (uToronto);
- the ability to choose users from any role except student for Distribution Reviewers (uOttawa);
- the ability to trigger assessment tasks in bulk instead of creating a new Distribution (Queen’s);
- the ability to disable a learner’s ability to release evaluation forms to faculty (Queen’s).
Bookmark Enhancements
Elentra Core, KP
Several enhancements were made to the internal bookmarks feature, including the ability for users to add links to external services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and Office 365. Administrators also now have the ability to blacklist or ban certain domains from being bookmarkable by users.
Learning Events are now associated with Curriculum Periods
uOttawa, Elentra Core
Each Learning Event must now be associated with a curriculum period. This critical feature clears up any possible ambiguity around who the intended audience of a Learning Event is in cases where curriculum periods are overlapping (i.e., during Clerkship or in longitudinal courses).
Associate Communities/Course Websites with Curriculum Periods
uToronto
In cases where you would like to keep a consistent or permanent course website intact for a cohort, this feature will allow administrators to copy an existing course website and associate each copy with a different curriculum period.
Gradebook Assessment Document Delivery
UBC
The Course Gradebook has always been heavily utilized to allow learners to upload and submit digital assignments (e.g., PDFs, Word, PowerPoints) for a course. Now there is a new Document Delivery feature that will enable course administrators to distribute personalized documents to the learners in the course. This feature can be very useful for things like personalized instructions and assessment summaries.
Copy Course Groups from one Course to another
UCLA
This feature enables administrators to copy existing course groups and group members from one course to another, which is especially useful in cases where multiple courses utilize the same groups of learners.
Enhancements to the Learning Events calendar
WSU
The visual calendar within the Learning Events module has been modified to now show the pop-over preview of the selected event, which includes instructors, required preparation, attendance requirements, session breakdown, and resources. This functionality is consistent with how this information is displayed on the Dashboard for learners and faculty members.
Examity Integration in Exam Module
Queen’s
In addition to the existing RP-Now option, Elentra ME now supports scheduling and writing of remotely proctored high-stakes exams through the commercially available Examity service. Remote proctoring enables learners in remote sites to securely write high-stakes exams on their own computer, while ensuring exam integrity.
Changes Relevant for Technical Professionals
Upgrade of Zend Framework from v1 to v2
Zend, Elentra Core
We have invested in a major upgrade from Zend Framework 1.12 to several libraries offered by Zend Framework 2. Some of the components include Zend Permissions ACL, Zend Config, Zend Mail, Zend LDAP, Zend Console, and Zend i18n.
Initial Support for Programmatically Managing ACL Permissions
Queen’s
Access permissions within the Elentra Platform are handled by a highly adaptable database layer built on top of Zend Permissions ACL. While this functionality continues to serve us well, it does not easily support the ability to create/manage new dynamic permissions for individual users or adhoc groups of users. Queen’s has built the initial code required to support this functionality, with a user interface being developed to support this in a future version of Elentra.
LDAP Support Improvements
UCLA, Elentra Core
In order to support a growing number of LDAP and Active Directory configuration requirements by consortium IDM groups, we have redefined the LDAP configuration constants used by Elentra during authentication. During the upgrade process, make sure that you review the default settings.inc.php file and account for the new constants in your production settings file.
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]