April 15, 2020 | Dear April Test Pilots,

Thank you for agreeing to participate as a Test Pilot in the Online Clinical Externship. This is a cross college project to enable students in our graduate medical programs to advance their clinical knowledge and skills without physical patient contact. The core competencies of professional licensed acupuncturists include broad areas of patient care essential to health care delivery, exclusive of physical patient contact and the performance of needling. This clinical externship will advance student competencies in those other areas.

Technology | This externship is conducted through a highly regarded learning management system, Canvas by Instructure. Canvas is used by large school districts and medical schools including Cornell which is linked as a training resource. The externship is hosted as acustudy.instructure.com. All participating institutions will have an autonomous sub-account to manage their enrolled students. We will also use the Google education infrastructure including Google drive, docs and slides for group collaborations and projects. Video meetings are recommended to default to Google Meets or optionally Zoom. These common accessible platforms will be used to ensure seamless interoperability throughout this online externship. The technology may initially be unfamiliar but will be seen as a foundational strength. Practices to connect and access content are readily available through multiple paths but need to be made consistent.

Synchronicity | Scheduled live google meets is the preferred individual and group interaction. Recorded live google meets is next. Discussions should commonly be used.

Telemedicine | This is not a telemedicine project. I hope we all support those efforts, but this is not that.

This is Not | Intended to replace the entire clinical training experience, it is designed to end by December 31, 2020.

Cross College | Cross college collaboration is at the core of this clinical curriculum. Some medical professions include residencies that “match” graduates from different medical schools to different residency programs. Among the primary goals of this process is to mix different graduates from separate medical schools into smaller common residencies to ensure a consistent set of competencies throughout the entire profession.

Competency Based Graduate Medical Education | Curriculum development and student assessment will be guided by current principles and practices in competency based graduate medical education (cbgme). This includes framework design of entrustable professional activities (epa) and milestones.

Framework | Developing a Framework of Core Competencies Document by December 2020 is a goal.

Structure and Creativity | The principle is to provide sufficient structure and guidance to support creativity and imagination.

Challenges | In addition to functioning as test pilots, as we accelerate down the runway, we are asking you to design and build the plane integrating feedback from rapidly boarding new passengers, all at different stages of development and areas of need and interest. This only justification for this process is its urgent critical necessity and the hope that we could do this better together than separately.

Cultural Curriculum | We need to rapidly organize and orient new students as peers and colleagues in a safe welcoming friendly professional community. Cultivating community is an critical necessity to support individual learning and common externship goals.

The Ask | Do you see what we’re up to? What are you interested in; where do you want to help?

Interns | Senior Interns | Mid-Clinic Interns | Observers | Students
Project Groups | Project Leads |
Faculty | Supervisors
Professionals | Advisors | Contributors
Institutional Administrator | Has full control functions of their institutional sub-account