2025-2026 ANNUAL HIGHLIGHTS
Digital Solutions for Education
Digital Solutions for Education includes two core teams, Education Delivery Services and Educational Technology, working in close partnership with faculty, staff, and learners across the UBC Faculty of Medicine.
Educational Technology
Supporting teaching and learning through the creation and implementation of various learning artifacts.
Bringing the Department of Medicine’s Strategic Plan to Life
As the Department of Medicine’s 2023–2027 Strategic Plan reached its midpoint, the department needed a more effective way to communicate progress to more than 1,800 faculty members across 18 divisions as traditional updates like emails and newsletters could easily be overlooked. Building on a previous collaboration, the department partnered with EdTech to produce a story-driven video, from concept and scripting through filming, editing, and premiere event marketing.
Click here to watch the full video
KEY INSIGHTS
The video reached 35,000 impressions and 5,100+ total views across YouTube and social media, with 40% of website views coming directly from the Department of Medicine’s own site.
Driving Learner Engagement Through AI Virtual Patients
Medical students need a safe way to practice clinical interviewing and reasoning. The Department of Ophthalmology partnered with EdTech to evaluate whether a conversational AI virtual patient could support student learning. The evaluation tracked engagement across 111 students and 773.5 minutes of AI interaction. Across five design iterations, session length rose 168% and 3.1x more students reached the feedback stage, suggesting real-time AI drives engagement when practice feels natural.
Engagement Depth Among Meaningful Users
Through iterative testing, learning analytics, and student feedback, EdTech refined the virtual patient experience. Key improvements, including reduced latency and real-time speech-to-speech interaction made clinical conversations more responsive, creating a stronger foundation for sustained clinical skills practice.
Learner Feedback
“Clicking or typing answers feels like I’m doing a module. This AI tool feels like I’m seeing an actual patient, and that makes the learning solidify instead of staying passive.” (Anonymous)
Supporting Faculty and Staff in the Safe Use of AI
As interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) grew across the Faculty of Medicine, staff needed practical guidance to use these tools safely and effectively. EdTech responded by offering one-on-one drop-in clinics for UBC Copilot Chat and developing a best-practices resource tailored to the Faculty of Medicine. Together, these supports are helping staff build confidence with generative AI while encouraging safe, responsible use.
Contributing to a Provincial Simulation Strategy for BC Health Education
Health education programs across British Columbia face growing challenges securing enough clinical placement opportunities for learners. To help address this, public post-secondary institutions and health authorities came together to explore how simulation-based learning could be used more consistently across the province. As representatives of the Faculty of Medicine Health Professions programs, EdTech participated in a two-day co-design sprint to help develop a provincial strategy for standards-based simulation use, including where simulation could complement or support traditional practice education. Drawing from the knowledge of BC’s simulation landscape, EdTech helped identify opportunities, share lessons learned, and shape recommendations for the draft strategy.
Standardizing Motor Assessments Through Video-Based Teaching
Motor assessments measure young children’s coordination, balance, and movement skills to help practitioners understand their motor development and identify areas that may need support. However, assessment approaches can vary across practitioners, disciplines, and clinical settings, making consistency and standardization challenging. The Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy (OSOT) partnered with EdTech to create a series of 10 short instructional videos demonstrating a standardized, evidence-informed approach to motor assessments. The videos reflect consistent assessment practices, enhance learning for OSOT students, and provide a foundation for future research and community resources.
Testing Speech Perception in Virtual Reality
Speech perception is key to understanding how well children with cochlear implants hear and communicate. However, traditional assessments take place in sound booths, which don’t reflect the everyday listening environments where these children use their hearing. To better understand how children perceive speech in real-world settings, Dr. Douglas Sladen partnered with EdTech to develop an immersive virtual reality prototype that combines realistic environments, spatial audio, and enhanced data collection. The prototype is now being used to support ongoing research into speech perception and provide data for future publications and grant applications.
Education Delivery Services
Providing technical support for educational administrative platforms and systems across the Faculty.
Bringing Tenure Stream Faculty into Centralized Teaching Tracking
The MD Undergraduate Program (MDUP) tracks the teaching records of tenure stream faculty across multiple processes. To reduce administrative effort and improve reporting, MDUP partnered with EDS to expand the Teaching Tracking and Payment System, integrating tenure stream faculty payment tracking into one centralized workflow. Faculty can now review their teaching records in one place while administrators benefit from more accurate data and streamlined reporting.
The TTPS dashboard provides a centralized view of tenure-stream teaching activities, supporting consistent tracking, validation, and more streamlined administrative processes.
Elentra Cloud Learning Management System Migration
With the Faculty of Medicine’s learning management system, Entrada, reaching end of life, a new platform was needed to ensure uninterrupted teaching and learning. Representatives from undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, health professions programs, and other faculty groups partnered with EDS, EdTech and Governance, Strategy and Planning (GSP) to transition to Elentra, a cloud-based LMS. After extensive user testing, the migration of all data and users was completed over a single weekend, on schedule and with minimal disruption.
Elentra dashboard providing centralized access to courses, learning activities, and key resources.
Modernizing the MD Undergraduate Program Admissions Platform
The MD Undergraduate Program (MDUP) Admissions team relied on a system that no longer met UBC’s cybersecurity requirements and was nearing end-of-life, resulting in more manual work and PDF-based processes. The Admissions team partnered with EDS to implement AMP (Applicant Management Platform), supported by Zap Solutions and branded publicly as the Online Admissions System (OAS), in time for the 2025–26 admissions cycle. The new platform streamlines application reviews, interviews, offers, and enrollment while improving security and data quality.
Online Admissions System dashboard, providing a centralized view of applicant information and key admissions activities.
KEY INSIGHTS
Digitizing the evaluation workflow is estimated to have saved around 448 staff hours during the 2025–26 admissions cycle. This is based on the admissions team’s estimate of 2 minutes saved per assessment, applied across the 13,443 assessments completed this cycle.
Migrating Resident Reimbursement to Oracle APEX
The Resident Reimbursement Site is an online portal where residents submit reimbursement claims for mandatory training, travel, and housing expenses. When its SharePoint platform reached end-of-support in June 2026, a sustainable solution was needed to avoid interrupted service and to address platform risk. Postgraduate Medical Education partnered with EDS to smoothly migrate the portal to Oracle APEX. The migration ensured long-term support and reliability, while reducing operational risk.
Centralized Oracle APEX interface for resident expense submissions and automated approval management.
KEY INSIGHTS
Since launching on May 19, 2026, the new APEX platform has supported 1,014 active users and processed 1,192 reimbursement claims.
Rebuilding FLEX Activity Management in Oracle APEX
Flexible Enhanced Learning (FLEX) courses give undergraduate medical students opportunities to participate in research, leadership, community engagement, and other scholarly activities throughout Years 1, 2, and 4. Registration was managed through a custom module in UBC’s Entrada learning management system. When the Entrada Consortium disbanded in 2025, the module needed a new home before the transition to Elentra Cloud. The MD Undergraduate Program Systems and FLEX administrative teams partnered with EDS to rebuild the module in Oracle APEX. Delivered on schedule in April 2026, the new solution ensured uninterrupted registration while improving reporting and data analytics.
Before and after: The FLEX registration dashboard was redesigned in Oracle APEX to provide a more streamlined experience, improved analytics capabilities, and a more flexible low-code platform for future updates.