This document discusses a project to collect and share teaching tips from an annual faculty development event using an online platform. It evaluates different options before selecting Evernote for its ease of use and accessibility across devices. To improve contribution and track usage, it develops a hybrid approach integrating the education platform OpenLabyrinth. The results show 95 collected tips from 45 authors on teaching and clinical topics with little redundancy and high relevance, though some teachers remain reluctant to contribute. Metrics on impact and usage are now possible through the new integration that was previously lacking in Evernote alone.

1. More information at http://topps.tel
Teaching Tips
Fred Janke, David Topps
Background:
Our community-based faculty meet annually
in Kananaskis, to discuss teaching challenges,
and techniques. We accumulated a collection
of Teaching Tips in a ground-up approach with
lessons from the “coalface”. These TTips
generated further activity but this was focused
on the single weekend event, to be then
forgotten and inaccessible for 363 days.
Various methods have been tried to improve
access and discoverability .
Technical aspects :
Conclusions:
• affordable and simple method of gathering
and publishing tips
• new hybrid approach, with activity metrics
from OpenLabyrinth, provides more useful
data, & better contribution mechanisms
• distribution of Tip highlights through social
media has increased exposure
• more user-friendly than wikis
• benefited from cross-platform integration
Above: connecting with
OpenLabyrinth platform for better
information flow and tracking
Acknowledgments:
• Funding support from Alberta Rural Physician Action Plan
• Medbiquitous Learning Experience Working Group
Left: internal form
for gathering new
tips, with spam
protection
Software development led by
OpenLabyrinth Development Consortium
http://openlabyrinth.ca
Right: A beautiful setting
for faculty development –
Kananaskis country
Above: a selection of tips in Evernote
The Approach:
Previous attempts using mobile database
replication proved too complex to maintain.
Cloud-based collaborative annotation software
has made this easier by providing readily
accessible infrastructure. After a comparative
evaluation process, including wikis and PDF-
sharing apps, we selected Evernote for ease of
use, simple replication, and device-agnostic
accessibility. After 3 years of TTips, we
enhanced this service by improving
contribution mechanisms and
recommendation/ popularity/usage tracking
(not available in Evernote, or its add-ons) so
we developed a hybrid approach with existing
education research tool, OpenLabyrinth .
Some
Kananaskis
participants –
just to see if
you are paying
attention! 28th
G8 summit was
held there.
Above: text, graphs, photos can all easily be captured in tips
Results:
• 95 tips so far
• 66 tagged teaching; 26 tagged clinical
• 45 authors
• Qualitative analysis of these has shown little redundancy
and high relevance
• Clinical teachers remain reticent to contribute or edit
others’ tips
• No affordance in Evernote to evaluate impact or usage
therefore  activity metrics, using xAPI
• Pricing changes in Evernote  exploring alternatives
Below: example xAPI statements in Learning Record Store