Since 2003 HAPS members have been sharing teaching tips with each other through HAPS publications. Over the years these teaching tips were archived primarily in whole-publication pdf files of the HAPS Educator. While it was always exciting to see the tips each time a new edition of HAPS Educator was publish, what could you do if you remembered reading about a tip 3-5 (or maybe even 10) years ago? Go rummage through all the pdfs?
A related problem has to do with using the HAPS Learning Outcomes. These represent a vast amount of work and are an incredible resource for HAPS members as well as the broader community (most publishers and many programs have adopted the HAPS Learning Outcomes), but adopting them for your course can be daunting at first.
So we got together this Summer and solved both problems!
First, HAPS member Kathy Burleson went through all the back issues of HAPS Educator and uncovered over 220 teaching tips reaching all the way back to 2003. She turned each teaching tip (known over the years as an “edu-snippet”) into a separate document and assigned each to a specific HAPS Learning Outcome. In some cases a tip was assigned to two or three Learning Outcomes.
Then we took all that information and made a website out of it. All the Learning Outcomes are listed in abbreviated form and ones that have associated teaching tips are colored green. At the same time all the teaching tips are listed for each major category of Learning Outcome are grouped where they can easily be browsed.
We added search features that search within each document, so a search for “artery” for example, will pull that term from within each teaching tip that uses it. This should prove to be very handy.
And finally there are short summaries of each teaching tip listed as comments that make it easy to focus on what you need.
Awesome work, Kathy! Thanks from all of us!
Thanks you!