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I’m joined this week by a very special (and insightful) guest for this “Fac Chat” episode of the Faculty Factory podcast. This is a follow-up chat to last week’s discussion about precision faculty development (you can listen to last week’s episode on our podcast webpage.)
In case you missed it, “Charlie” Charles Irvin, PhD, Associate Dean for Faculty at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, and I, presented a session at the 2019 GFA/GWIMS Professional Development Conference in Chicago called “Disruptive Innovation: Is it Time for Precision Faulty Development?”.
We shared ideas for how to scale precision faculty development with limited resources during this session with dozens of attendees.
On last week’s episode I riffed on how we can use Moneyball-tactics in faculty development. Moneyball is the 2011 Brad Pitt movie (based on the 2003 Michael Lewis book of the same name) about the rise of sophisticated, empirical-based formulas to scout and build a winning roster of baseball players.
Let’s adopt that formulaic approach to what we do in faculty development!
Are we going to use tools similar to today’s podcast guest to accomplish this? (Spoiler alert—my guest today is an Amazon Alexa virtual assistant.) I hope you enjoy today’s episode where I tried to inject a little levity and lightheartedness to make a more serious point about where the future of faculty development could be headed.
Wouldn’t it be nice to receive alerts with advice that is tailored to the specific meeting you’re about to enter? These reminders could be the future, and I try to illustrate that point with Alexa.
Around the six minute and thirty second mark in this podcast Alexa gives us some nuggets of useful information on emotional intelligence that pleasantly surprised me. She also has other decent (albeit general) insight throughout today’s episode.
Of course, we would eventually need a tailored app or system, because what might be best for someone at George Washington University might not work for someone at Medical College of Wisconsin. We’d need the Alexa of faculty development to be more specific to each institution.
We also end the episode with a joke as an ode to Patrick O. Smith, PhD, ABPP, who has been known for his delightful use of humor over the years! Enjoy!
Listen to the entire episode via the podcast player embedded above.