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Register for Elentra Engage 2022, Pasadena

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues.

Elentra Engage 2022, where the community becomes our network.

Elentra Engage 2022, where the community becomes our network. Sponsored by the Elentra Consortium, this annual invitational event brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from international medical schools and health sciences programs to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience. The 2022 conference will have four tracks focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Leadership, Administration, and Technical Professionals with some talks focused on the Elentra Corp offering. Elentra Engage is an excellent professional development opportunity for staff and faculty. You will learn applicable skills specifically related to the integrated teaching and learning platform you use every day.

Be sure to book your hotel by July 1st to get our special conference hotel rate of $209 USD. Conference registration is open, so why not register today?

CBE Data Visualization and Reports Working Group

The northern lights over a mountain range

The Elentra Consortium is pleased to announce the formation of a CBE Data Visualization and Reports Working Group. The goal of these meetings is the create tools needed to understand how learners are progressing through your competency-based curriculum.  

This Working Group is open to everyone, regardless of being a consortium member. Our first meeting is schedule for February 3rd, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. EST.

Please email [email protected] for access to the Zoom meeting link.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Elentra at Queen’s University & GitHub

We are excited to share an article that was published today on GitHub.com about the Elentra Consortium at Queen’s University’s use of the GitHub platform: https://github.com/customer-stories/queens-university

This article gives Elentra some wonderful exposure (right beside Pinterest, Qualcomm, SAP, and Spotify), but it also highlights and markets how universities can use GitHub to collaborate on software development.

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

Matt Simpson
Associate Director, Elentra Consortium
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University

Website: https://elentra.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]

Register for Elentra Engage 2019, New York City

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues.

Elentra Engage 2019, where the community becomes our network.

Sponsored by the Elentra Consortium, this annual invitational event brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from international consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience. The 2019 conference will again have a track that is focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Administration, while the second is geared towards our Technical Professionals. Elentra Engage is an excellent professional development opportunity for staff and faculty. You will learn applicable skills specifically related to the integrated teaching and learning platform you use every day.

Be sure to book your hotel by July 1st to get our special conference hotel rate of $299 USD. Conference registration is open, so why not register today? Still not convinced? View our exciting conference agenda.

1. View Conference Agenda 2. Book my Hotel 3. Register for Conference

Introducing the Elentra Consortium

The northern lights over a mountain range

Entrada Consortium becomes Elentra Consortium

In March of 2008, the MEdTech Unit toiled away in a Barrie Street office in the School of Medicine at Queen’s University trying to come up with a name to describe a new collaborative development effort between Queen’s University and University of Calgary. We wanted to do more than just share code with each other; we wanted to create a sustainable and inclusive community that would eventually meet all of the teaching, learning and administrative needs of modern medical education.

After nearly three days of deliberation, we decided on “Entrada” which means entrance in Spanish and Portuguese. This name was significant to us because we felt that Entrada was the front door to your medical education curriculum.

After a quick Canadian trademark search cleared on March 12, 2008, (we weren’t thinking Internationally at the time) we decided to use Entrada and began our journey to success.

10-years later, the Entrada Consortium is a vibrant and thriving International community of 18 Medical schools, including our three founding schools: Queen’s University, University of Calgary, and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

Today, we are excited to announce that the Entrada Consortium will be rebranded as the Elentra Consortium.

Elentra Logo

Our new name Elentra™ looks to the future (Ele = enhanced learning environment), while representing our past (entra), and will provide a home for the Elentra Platform, which consists of Elentra Admissions, Elentra ME, and Elentra CPD.

The most important cornerstone of this effort, our consortium, which has collaborated to create this amazing platform, remains represented by a solid and growing Elentra Consortium core team, a key strategic unit within Queen’s University.

Over the next 3-months, before the Elentra ME 1.13 release, we will be working hard to update the branding of our website, transitioning GitHub, introducing Jira and strong Agile development methodologies such as user stories, sprints, and epics. Further and more detailed updates will go out as these changes are applied.

One important question that has been raised by a few schools which have not renamed their local instance of Entrada to something other than Entrada is “can we continue to use the name Entrada?” Yes, we have no issue with your local implementation of Elentra being branded as Entrada, MedTech Central, Osler, Gryphon, eFlo, or any other name. Our Elentra rebranding effort does not need to impact your local implementation.

If you have any questions or feedback, as always, please do not hesitate to reach out by telephone, Slack, or email.

Sincerely,
Matt Simpson

Technical Director, Elentra Consortium
School of Medicine,
Queen’s University
Abramsky Hall, Room 206
Kingston, Ontario
Canada, K7L 3N6

Phone: 613-533-6000 x78146
Email: [email protected]
Web: https://entrada.org

Entrada Conf 2018 Announced

Aurora Borealis

Save the Date

September 17–18, 2018
Vancouver, British Columbia

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues. Entrada Conf 2018, where the community becomes our network.

Sponsored by the Entrada Consortium, Entrada Conf is an annual event that brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from international consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience.

The 2018 conference will again have a track that is focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Administration, while the second is geared towards our Technical Professionals.

Topics will include:

  • What it takes to manage and govern the Entrada Platform at your institution effectively.
  • How the functional processes of your medical school can map to features available within the Entrada Platform.
  • How to effectively manage your curriculum data and the processes that support curriculum renewal.
  • How Entrada ME supports Competency-Based Medical Education.

Help shape the future of your Entrada Platform by providing direct feedback and interacting with the Entrada Executive Committee.

Have a Topic Idea? Call For Submissions

The Call for Submissions is open to all faculty and staff of Entrada Consortium member institutions. We are looking for people who are interested in presenting topics or ideas related to Entrada and/or educational technology. Please submit your session or topic idea by April 20th, 2018.

Please feel free to contact Laura McDiarmid at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions related to the conference.

Locations & Accommodations

Entrada Conf 2018 is happening at Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver; a hub for dialogue and engagement initiatives that is just steps from the official conference hotel. The Delta Hotels Vancouver Downtown Suites is just minutes from all Vancouver has to offer. There is a special conference rate of $229.00 CAD per night. August 1, 2018 is the last day to book a room, so make sure to book early.

Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue
3300 – 515 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6B 1L6 Canada

Delta Hotels Vancouver Downtown Suites
550 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6B 1L6 Canada

Add Entrada Conf 2018 To Your Calendar

You can use this iCalendar file to easily import Entrada Conf 2018 on September 17th and 18th into your favorite calendar application. For most, just download then double-click to import.

Entrada Developers Choose PhpStorm

phpStorm by JetBrains The Entrada development team has selected PhpStorm by JetBrains as the officially sanctioned and recommended Integrated Development Environment for doing PHP development related to the Entrada Platform. For nearly four years, PhpStorm has provided the developers of our Open Source software with a reliable and feature rich IDE that sees continuous enhancements and improvements. Thank you to JetBrains for providing us with this.

Conflict of Interest Declaration: Due to the fact that Entrada is licensed under GPLv3, and in exchange for posting an entirely true statement about our development team’s experience using PhpStorm, JetBrains has granted our developers a no-cost license for the use of PhpStorm. For more information on PhpStorm, please visit the JetBrains website.

Entrada Conf 2017 Registration Now Open

Chicago

Registration for Entrada Conf 2017 is now open!

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues.

Sponsored by the Entrada Consortium, this annual event brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from 12 to 15 International consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience.

This year we are pleased to announce that we have expanded and refocused our conference to include an accredited Faculty and Administration track. Physicians who attend will be eligible for continuing medical education credits in Canada and the United States.

Learn more by visiting our conference website at: https://conference.entrada.org

Entrada Conf 2017 Announced

Chicago

Save the Date

September 25–26, 2017
Chicago, Illinois

Registration for Entrada Conf 2017 opens in June

Entrada Conf 2017 Graphic

Learn from the experts. Share your ideas. Network with colleagues. Entrada Conf 2017, where the community becomes our network.

Sponsored by the Entrada Consortium, Entrada Conf is an annual event that brings together faculty, administration, and technical staff from 12 to 15 International consortium member medical schools to provide a rich educational, leadership, and networking experience.

This conference has historically been focused on the technical aspects Entrada; while this important topic will remain as the “Technical Professionals” track, the Entrada Conference Planning Committee is pleased to announce that we have expanded and refocused the event to now include an accredited Faculty and Administration track. Physicians who attend will be eligible for continuing medical education credits in Canada and the United States.

Two Conference Tracks

The first conference track is focused specifically on the needs of Faculty and Administration, while the second is geared towards our Technical Professionals.

Some Session Topics Include

  • Learn what it takes to manage and govern the Entrada Platform at your institution effectively.
  • Learn how the functional processes of your medical school can map to features available within the Entrada Platform.
  • Learn how to effectively manage your curriculum data and the processes that support curriculum renewal.
  • Learn how Entrada ME supports Competency-Based Medical Education.
  • Help shape the future of your Entrada Platform by providing direct feedback and interacting with the Entrada Executive Committee.
  • Hackathon! Have an idea for something great in Entrada? Watch as 2 teams of developers compete to build your idea into the platform live. May the best team and feature win!

Have a Topic Idea? Call For Submissions

The Call for Submissions is open to all faculty and staff of Entrada Consortium member institutions. We are looking for people who are interested in presenting topics or ideas related to Entrada and/or educational technology. Please submit your session or topic idea by June 13th, 2017.

Please feel free to contact Matt Simpson at 613-533-6000 x78146 or [email protected] with any questions or suggestions related to the conference.

Locations & Accommodations

OFFSITE Chicago is a creative, inspiring and high-tech environment that is just steps from the Hampton Inn Chicago Downtown West Loop hotel. A hotel room block has been reserved at a special conference rate of $199USD per night.

560 W Washington Blvd
Chicago, IL 60661

Add Entrada Conf 2017 To Your Calendar

You can use this iCalendar file to easily import Entrada Conf 2017 on September 25th and 26th into your favorite calendar application. For most, just download then double-click to import.

Entrada Conf 2016

CN Tower

Attention Entrada contributors! Join us on Tuesday, May 31st, 2016 for Entrada Conf 2016. This year Entrada Conf is taking place in beautiful Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the unique and innovative “Think-Site” space.

Location

Think-Site is located one block west of Spadina on Richmond Street West. Located in the Starwood building, it is steps away from the eclectic core of Queen Street West and the urban chic of King Street West.

Schedule

  • 9:00AM: Breakfast, Introductions, and Welcome
  • 9:30AM: School Tour – (East to West) 15 minute Entrada walk through from each school
  • 11:00AM-12:00PM: Group Discussion on PHP Frameworks and “Entrada 2.0”
  • 12:00PM-1:00PM: Lunch
  • 1:00PM-2:00PM: Roadmap development for 2016/2017
  • 2:00PM-2:45PM: Gitting It Right – Development Workflow
  • 2:45PM-3:00PM: Break
  • 3:00PM-3:45PM: Shipping Entrada in Containers (Docker et la)
  • 3:45PM-4:30PM: Load Testing Entrada
  • 4:30PM-5:15PM: Entrada Approach to Unit Testing
  • 7:00PM: Dinner and Drinks

Speakers

  • Zhen Gu
  • Jim Cassidy
  • Geoff Harvey
  • Matt Simpson

Registration is now over; however, if you have specific questions or would like clarification regarding information contained in this post please contact us.

Entrada Becomes Entrada Platform

The Entrada Project has been actively developing Entrada for nearly eight years now, and today, as a result of the enthusiasm and hard work of dozens of people from five North American Medical Schools, we would like to announce Entrada Platform™.

Entrada Platform is a consistent and integrated suite of software designed to serve the needs of Medical Schools and other Health Sciences Faculties (Dentistry, Nursing, Rehabilitation Therapy, Veterinary Medicine, etc) from Undergraduate Admissions, to Undergraduate Medical Education, Postgraduate / Graduate Medical Education, through to Continuing Professional Development.

In essence we have built a flexible suite of software capable of supporting physician education from the time they apply to Medical school through to career retirement.

The Entrada Platform consists of three major components that can be installed entirely separately, or work together to deliver the whole experience:

  • Entrada Admissions
  • Entrada ME
  • Entrada CPD

Each of these components is built upon the open source Entrada Core, but they each contain a series of consortium licensed (less open) modules that are specific to the purpose.

Today we are announcing the release of three packages, with more information on each to follow shortly:

  1. Entrada ME 1.6.1 Open Edition
  2. Entrada ME 1.6.1 Consortium Edition
  3. Entrada CPD 1.0 Consortium Edition

The last component (Entrada Admissions) has been developed for Queen’s University Undergraduate Medical Education, and will be refactored and made available to Consortium members as soon as possible.

We have a number of exciting announcements coming up in the next little while, so please stay tuned.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact us.

Entrada Developers Choose PhpStorm

PhpStorm LogoThe Entrada development team has selected PhpStorm by JetBrains as the officially sanctioned and recommended Integrated Development Environment for doing PHP development related to the Entrada Platform. For nearly two years, PhpStorm has provided the developers of our Open Source software with a reliable and feature rich IDE that sees continuous enhancements and improvements. Thank you to JetBrains for providing us with this.

Conflict of Interest Declaration: Due to the fact that Entrada is licensed under GPLv3, and in exchange for posting an entirely true statement about our development team’s experience using PhpStorm, JetBrains has granted our developers a no-cost license for the use of PhpStorm. For more information on PhpStorm, please visit the JetBrains website.

Welcome University of Ottawa

It is our pleasure to formally announce that the Entrada Community Partner family has once again grown.

The University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine is one of the foremost medical schools in Canada, providing learners with the opportunity to study in both English and French languages. uOttawa has joined the Entrada Consortium and the process of implementing Entrada ME (Undergraduate and Postgraduate), and Entrada CPD (Continuing Education) is well under way.

The uOttawa MedTech team has been outstanding in the process already, and will be an integral part of Entrada developer community going forward.

On behalf of the entire Entrada community, welcome University of Ottawa.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this announcement please contact us.

Exploring Entrada Video Released

Would you like a better picture of the entire Entrada ecosystem? We have created a 5 minute video called “Exploring Entrada” that clearly illustrates what Entrada is all about, and what it can do for your organization.

This video was originally developed for a symposium presentation called “Curriculum Management Systems for Competency-Based Programs” at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (April, 2015).

Also look for us at AAMC GIR Conference (June, 2015), and AAMC Conference (November, 2015). We will see you there!

You can also see this on Vimeo.

Special Thank-You to Chris Hartjes

The Entrada development team would like to thank Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) for sharing his wonderful PHP unit testing expertise with some of our team on Friday, November 7th at True North PHP. His time and expertise were greatly appreciated as we further develop unit testing practices and procedures within the Entrada platform.

A New Entrada – Entrada 1.5.1

A new community partner, a new collaborative software development platform, and a fancy new Entrada software release. Welcome to Entrada 1.5.1.

Welcome David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

We are pleased to officially announce that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has joined the Entrada consortium as our 4th official Entrada Community Partner. With the help of their focused and driven software developers, not to mention feedback from their world renowned medical educators, we have already seen great contributions from them to Entrada software. Thank-you, welcome, and we are very excited to be working with you.

Entrada on GitHub

In our continuing efforts to improve project collaboration, visibility, and efficiency we have moved and consolidated our software development management into the world’s largest open source community, GitHub. GitHub’s robust platform now powers our code management, issue management, and documentation wiki. Fork us on GitHub!

Entrada 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 Released

It is with great pleasure that the Entrada development community announces the immediate availability of Entrada 1.5.1 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

Entrada 1.5.0 was released in July but never received a proper release announcement on our website. This release announcement will therefore cover new and modified features in both versions of Entrada.

  • Entrada Mobile 1.5 (iOS, Android, and BlackBerry 10 compatible)
  • Newly redesigned Entrada interface utilizing Twitter Bootstrap and HTML5
  • New ability to explore and browse the mapped curriculum with Curriculum Explorer
  • New ability for learners to submit, and staff / faculty to approve observership requests
  • New ability for learners to maintain a clinical encounter log book
  • Streamlined message centre for students that replaced dashboard notices
  • Significantly improved objective set management at the organizational level
  • Significantly improved curriculum mapping interface at course, learning event, and assessment level
  • Significantly improved user and administrative sides of clerkship management
  • Streamlined attendance tracking for learning events
  • Streamlined course gradebook and assignment dropbox functionality
  • Streamlined ability to synchronize class lists with centrally provided LDAP information
  • Ability to add descriptive text, page breaks, and question randomization to quizzes
  • Ability to select the fields that are included when exporting learning events
  • Ability to add custom user profile fields for users in certain departments
  • Ability to time release objectives within learning events
  • Ability to record late submissions and resubmissions for assessments
  • Ability to create “public notices” that appear on the Entrada login page
  • New integrated rich text editor for better end-user experience
  • Increased password hash security
  • Removed unmaintained Tasks module
  • Removed old documentation, unit tests, and unmaintained developer tools

For more information on any of these features you can go through the closed issues for 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 on GitHub. Please be advised that the 1.5.0 release took place during the transition to GitHub so some new features / issues may not be documented here.

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

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
E-Mail: [email protected]

New Developer Community Online

Today we have launched our new Entrada Developer Community, which will serve as both the community hub and project management system for the Entrada Project. There are still a few small glitches we have to workout (i.e. OpenID support currently does not work), but please feel free to register an account and contribute if you would like.

We have also switched our source control management to Git as of this morning. All existing developers were notified via e-mail, and any new developers or people interested in watching the project can do so by cloning our public Git repository. For more information on how we are using Git, please see the Entrada_Git_Repository page on the wiki.

Entrada Poster Presentation at CCME

The Entrada team will be presenting a poster at this years Canadian Conference on Medical Education in St. John’s, Newfoundland titled “Entrada: Integrating Social Networking Within a Learning Management System Designed for Professional Education”. We will be doing a brief presentation on May 2nd between 2:00PM and 3:30PM, and there will be a dedicated poster session from 3:45PM until 4:45PM on May 3rd. We hope to see you there.

The official abstract is as follows:

Virtually all medical schools utilize some form of learning management system to deliver schedules and curricular content to their students, but these systems are often in private instances that do not facilitate the collaborative, humanities or leadership aspects of medical education. Over the past five years Queen’s University, Medical Education Technology Unit in collaboration with University of Calgary, Office of Undergraduate Medical Education has developed a novel and customizable integrated teaching and learning system called Entrada. In addition to curriculum and schedule management, Entrada incorporates social networking features that allow users to create and direct interactive communities for a wide range of activities, including over 200 such groups on interprofessional discussion, small group cases, student governance, and online learning modules across the two schools. Recently launched in the Schools of Rehabilitation Therapy and Nursing at Queen’s, Entrada can also be used to facilitate Interprofessional Education (IPE) by creating both communal and distinct virtual learning spaces for students enrolled in different programs. Newly released and upcoming features permit students and faculty to author and share quizzes, online cases, virtual patients, and aggregate library resources to support learning. Additionally, through the collaborative nature of the project, Entrada has created a culture of leadership in conceptualizing and realizing eLearning projects among IT groups. With the open source release, Entrada exemplifies leadership through sharing code with a global audience for the improvement of medical education through strong collaborative development.

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

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada Developer Conference 2009

The first annual “Entrada Developer Conference” will be held at the University of Calgary from Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 1:00PM until Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 12:00PM. This first conference is a wrapper for our first face-to-face developer meeting, development day and “business meeting”.