Page 4 - ACOTUP Spring 2012 Issue 12 v8_Layout 1

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“It’s not just academic knowledge but also life experience. When you are young a couple of years makes a big difference. We are challenged as educators to remember many are more mature and we need to incorporate their talents and their life experiences and help them build a career that is going to be rewarding for them. Many students don’t have a lot of time to waste, to explore, they know what they want to do and they want to get there. As a result it challenges our curriculum content to not only produce competent generalists who can start to work in any setting but also to accommodate for and encourage students who actually have some areas of expertise.” Dr. Liu gave the example of a student who entered the program and had already been working in the information technology industry. She wanted specialize in assistive technology and apply it to OT clientele. After completing the program she went back to the U.S. to work in that exact field.

“Cases like this remind us that we are no longer dealing with an undergraduate population. We really need to consider the individual contributions students can already bring into their education. So from a perspective of specialists or advanced practice training I think we should try and focus and give lots of consideration to what these students bring, “says Dr. Liu.

A further challenge facing OT education is that of information and technology. Changes in technology are taking place at such a fast pace. Technology within the health care system is necessarily going to impact the way students are educated and how programs embrace and use it.

“Our curriculum has to accommodate and incorporate the ethics of using technologies as well as the protocol for their use,” she says. When asked if the education system and the curriculums can cope with the speed at which technology is changing, Dr. Liu believes that;

“the way to do it is to use technology itself. Pretty soon the days of having paper copies of everything will be gone. I can see information being uploaded very quickly. One of the challenges will be giving people enough time to sit and digest information. Just because it’s there and it’s easy to upload, revise, change and update doesn’t mean that we should constantly do it. We will need to give consideration to the normal human processing time and the amount of information that we can actually reflect on at any one time. We also need to be aware of the need for human interaction.”

One of the exciting changes happening at the University of Alberta is the opening of a satellite program in Calgary; an announcement is expected later this spring. This move will allow the program, the only one in the province, to continue to grow. The program in Calgary will focus clearly on human contact explains Dr. Liu.

“We are doing it differently from other programs who stream in real time all of the course content. There will be instructors on-site for the students, at the same time we will be using technologies to students access course content efficiently. We will use technologies to help teach students how to do remote delegation and remote supervision with rehabilitation assistants who are training in Calgary. Students will have access mobile technologies as well, but everything will be deliberate and evaluated and serve a purpose. But the main mode of learning will be face-to-face because we don’t want technology to take over and replace the human contact.”

The University of Alberta sees more than 100 students graduate from the master’s program each year. For more information on the program, visit www.ot.ualberta.ca.

*You can read more about this interesting project in the summer issue of the ACOTUP newsletter.

Meet the ProgramChair

Meet the Program Chair con’t from page 3...