It is imperative that IPRO 339 sets new standards every semester. We plan to maintain the progress made over the last two semesters and take new initiatives in order to bring the IPRO program to a higher level of interprofessional education.
With progress made in assessment and debriefing, creating and selecting projects, communications and project reporting, and transitioning and training, we strive to maintain the following objectives.
Assessment of debriefing and IPRO Day
data. This data will be compared for the first time with data from the
fall semester to reveal the progress the program has made since IPRO
339 and the assessment process were created. This data will allow teams
to receive feedback on their performance relative to the mean, thus
allowing them to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses.
The team will administer sponsor, alumni, and
administration surveys in the summer of 2004 to assess the usefulness
of IPRO Projects in real-world situations. Results from these surveys
will be used to make suggestions on improving the quality of the IPRO
Program for students, faculty, sponsors and IIT administration.
Student involvement in creating and selecting
IPRO projects. This semester, students have played an active role
in creating criteria for selecting effective IPRO projects, and then
utilizing the criteria to select the projects to run for the fall.
The next step is to create new measures to increase student involvement
by encouraging students in all IPRO projects to research and propose
technologies suitable for projects and to define the real-world problems
pertinent to those technologies.
Along with the objectives listed above, there
are new initiatives that IPRO 339 would like to take in the future.
Creation of grading guidelines. New measures
will be created to allow the IPRO Program to collect data about student
learning and to ensure that the grade distribution adequately reflects
student learning. These measures would allow students’ learning
experiences to be correlated to their grades. We will also investigate
how grades are assigned in IPROs and what students’ expectations
are for their grades. All of this information will be used to create
a set of grading guidelines for faculty members to use in grading
students in an IPRO.
Develop new marketing strategies. This will be needed to attract
new sponsors, to maintain the current sponsor relationships, and to
market the IPRO Program not only in Chicago but also nationwide.
Benchmarking among other universities. Assessment data will be shared
with other universities to compare our IPRO program with similar programs
at other prominent institutions. A benchmarking consortium will be
created to allow the exchange of interprofessional best practices
between IIT and other institutions. This new initiative will have
a huge impact on the marketing and educational aspects of the program.
These objectives are important to our team and to the program. However,
this list is not exhaustive. New goals and ideas are always exciting
and worthy of investigation. After all, our goal is to make the IPRO
experience better for students, faculty and sponsors.
