Creating a new platform for the student academic experience: A partnership between academic public health and IT

Student enrollment in Schools of Public Health continues to expand. Simultaneously, access to technological and social networking platforms utilized by students has also expanded. The necessity of ensuring that SPH students can adequately record pertinent information from their academic journey while allowing SPH administrative access to such data is great and to that end the USF College of Public Health has worked with USF Health IT to develop a student portfolio system.

This creates a repository for students to record, store and track their competencies, accomplishments, and academic achievements. The system is set up as multi-access, therefore administration and faculty can also access the portfolio in a view/read only function to review, verify and/or support the student record. The portfolio contains the following major functional areas in which information is recorded: Degree/ Concentration competencies, Student Awards, Graduate Assistantships/Student Employment, and Publications/Research.

A summary of all student activities is populated by the information entered into the portfolio. Publications are also automatically populated into the student portfolio from PubMed and faculty annual review/evaluation documents. This unique link to the faculty evaluation system provides an avenue to both populate the relevant portfolio folder and to confirm student involvement. Students may also manually enter conference presentations, abstracts, papers and posters. Faculty mentors can then access the portfolio to confirm the manual entries made by their respective students. Finally, an automatically populated NIH biosketch feature is currently being built into the system to assist students as they prepare for the workforce and/or submission of grants.