I love to quantify work at the end of a year. Here's a look at some of the figures from the work of the ID+DP (Instructional Design and Digital Publishing) team.
What have we done?
As of today, the Medicine Digital Learning site has 853 pages published. What makes up that count? Here’s a breakdown of the pages that are visible to students, faculty, and staff.
Page count of components on the Medicine Digital Learning site
[Curious about the discrepancy between the published pages and the total component pages? Some are for internal use or other College of Medicine programs.]
The background
We created the Medicine Digital Learning site in 2020, during the pandemic (we used it for anatomy lab sessions—check out this blog post for more details!), but it wasn’t until the 2026 cohort began in 2022 that we had many learning materials on the site. The 2027 cohort was the first to latch on to using the site, and that was when the amount of content—and the resulting page views—increased by quite a bit.
Increase of components on the Medicine Digital Learning site, AY2020-present
In the entire academic year 2023–24, the Medicine Digital Learning site had over 26,000 visits. We have already surpassed that number by the end of term 1 of academic year 2024–25, with over 33,000 visits.
Medicine Digital Learning site visit comparison
What's everyone reading?
In the academic year 2023–24, the page with the most visits was the Dissector—not a surprise, since the MS1s spend so much time in the anatomy lab—followed by 2027’s cohort page and the first session of Molecular Biology: The cell. Ah, the heady days of the first day of medical school—so full of possibility, and no one is behind schedule!
For the first term of academic year 2024–25, the Medicine Digital Learning home page was the most visited—a triumph, in that it meant students were realizing that a lot of their materials were all in one handy place—followed by the Gross Anatomy textbook, the 2028 cohort page, and the Gross Anatomy home page. The Microaggressions page—an Interprofessional Education session—was number 5 (it’s very interesting, easy-to-read material, and it had a broad audience at multiple universities!).
As our excellent front-end developer Danielle Conti told me in the early days of our collaboration, interpreting the analytics of a website is both an art and a science. Collecting the figures is a first step, though, and we can count on curriculum experts to help us decide what is correlation or causation.
One thing is certain, though: the students are clicking—we have the tracking from E.Flo MD to confirm!
CBL
Case-Based Learning (CBL) is our most consistent Digital Publishing project—indeed, every case since the first day of the college has been handled by our team and delivered as an iBook.
BIPOC patients in CBL cases
This academic year, one of Heather’s priorities has been working with Dr. Jamie Kennel to make sure our cases are diverse and include health equity and belonging. Currently, we have 35 cases out of 80 with BIPOC patients, including a member of the Yakama Nation. It is important to our team that the cases represent the diverse patients who will be seen in Washington State by our medical students.
Read more about our simulated patients
Adobe Stock puts faces on our patients
In 2021 Dr. Dawn DeWitt sparked the use of patient photos in our digital publishing projects with the Transition to Residency challenge cases that
Instructional design
300+ Powerpoint slides reviewed
For the session materials, Amy has continued to move metaphorical mountains, one component at a time. Students are noticing—downloads of our slides have increased. Check out a sample of the beautiful covers!
Learn more about the Powerpoint template
The Powerpoint template, part 1
To kick off our Instructional Design series, we want to introduce you to that most ubiquitous tool in our arsenal: the PowerPoint presentation.
The Powerpoint template, part 2
In Part 2 of our series, read on for some of the features—and rationales behind them!—of the 2023 Powerpoint template.
The Powerpoint template, part 3
In this last installment, we are listing more of the features—and rationales behind them!—of the 2023 Powerpoint template.
What's up next?
In the upcoming months, we’ll be completing the Gross Anatomy textbook, and there are some exciting opportunities coming up for more materials that span all four years of the curriculum. Our Year 2 students go into their Transition to Clerkship in 513, so we will be preparing their CBL cases to take an exciting, complex turn. Digital accessibility will continue to be a priority, and we plan to continue maintaining and developing current materials for next year as well.
We are nothing without our authors! See our portfolio to see the work that we've collaborated on. We'd love to work with you, too. Please get in touch!