Good morning and thank you for this annual opportunity to report to the House of Delegates on the work of the Association. This is my 14th such presentation and like past years I have tried to identify the most salient elements of the past year that will influence the work we need to do together in the year that lies ahead. I hope that you have followed the link to the annual report we included in the last communication sent to delegates on Friday. It was brilliantly redesigned by our Communications Team and is worthy of your time to review this past year’s activities.
We have a lot of work to do! The theme for these remarks is drawn from a remarkable book published earlier this year by Kevin Carey. If you haven’t completed your summer reading list I highly recommend you add The End of College: The Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere to your list. It’s available via Amazon for download to your tablets and phones. I suspect some of you will have already hit your Amazon app to buy your copy before you leave the House session!
Carey is a journalist and first time book author. He was also a learner in Eric Lander’s course “Introduction to Biology – The Secret of Life”. It is offered by MIT and a required course for all MIT freshmen. Lander led the Human Genome Project prior to joining the MIT faculty. Carey and thousands of others from around the world took the course for free through EdX and learned biochemistry and genetics and biotechnology – quite an experience for a journalism major who couldn’t recall ever taking a serious science course in college.
The book isn’t about MOOCs, though he was certainly in one. I’ll quote from the introductory section:
“For the better part of the last 150 years, (Harvard and MIT) have sat, less than two miles apart, at the zenith of global higher education. They are bitter rivals for the world’s best scholars and students. Yet they had, in this time and place, decided to put their rivalries aside.”
“This unlikely collaboration came about because higher education now stands at the brink of transformation by information technology. Harvard and MIT are accelerating seismic forces that threaten colleges that have stood, largely unchanged, for decades or more. These historic developments will liberate hundreds of millions of people around the world, creating ways of learning that have never existed before. They will also upend a cornerstone of the American meritocracy, fundamentally altering the way our society creates knowledge and economic opportunity.”
“Whether they know it or not, Harvard and MIT are helping to build a new and unprecedented institution: the University of Everywhere.”
I encourage you to read it because, unless your plans include retirement in the next three to five years (which mine don’t by the way), what he covers in this book will change the way, and likely also the pace, of your work. And that holds great significance for AACP and our strategic planning. I’ll come back to planning before I finish these brief remarks.
Last year I explained that AACP had embarked on three significant endeavors: work on educational innovation which includes the launch of our serious games initiative, work to enhance our communications effectiveness, and an exploration of the construct and practice of knowledge management. Each has progressed successfully in the past twelve months and will continue toward full implementation in the months ahead. I’ll share a few words about each of these and close with invitations to help us advance our work on behalf of the academy.
As I spoke with Jane McGonigal, our opening keynote speaker, by phone in our typical speaker preparation call two weeks ago I said, “Jane, I want you to know that there likely will be some people in your audience on Sunday that are highly skeptical that games have any role to play in education.” She laughed and quipped, “There always are!” Whether it is games for health, for learning, or for fun, I hope you are more certain than ever that educational games will play a role in learning and assessment at all levels of learning and also health care, engaging our learners in ways traditional approaches to teaching never will.
I am pleased that the AACP Board of Directors took the bold steps over the past 18 months to implement the recommendation of the 2013-14 Academic Affairs Committee to embark on the development of games for health professions learners. Our collaboration with George Mason University Serious Games Institute has allowed us to bring MimycxTM to market in a few months’ time. Continuing to grow and develop in this incubator of innovation will allow us to expand the portfolio of quests and make learning the core competencies of interprofessional team-based care more accessible for many learners – possibly even as part of the University of Everywhere!
MimycxTM is our springboard for meeting your needs for educational innovation and more robust learning assessment tools. We hope to embark on work to bring it to the vitally important K-12 pipeline as well. As we heard clearly yesterday afternoon from UMBC President Hrabowski, there are very different characteristics about the learners in that pipeline. We need new and different tools and tactics to reach them. The recommendations contained in the white paper from the Special Committee on Admissions could not be more timely or important and we are eager to begin the implementation phase in partnership with you and your recruitment personnel.
This is where our communications enhancement efforts will come to fruition. Communicating in today’s congested media channels is truly challenging and that is why our staff and leaders spent substantial time over the past year assessing our audiences, our brand and our message pillars. There was controversy over what the right angles are for AACP’s communications focus – should we solely speak about pharmacy education or should our messages work to communicate more broadly about the exciting opportunities that are the contemporary work of pharmacists. “Pharmacists help patients live healthier and better lives” is the watchword. We want the right people, including our future students and their parents, to appreciate that pharmacists and pharmacy educators are smart, innovative, collaborative and accessible. Pharmacists are essential to the transforming health care system. If you can’t get medication use right not much else in the system works effectively.
We will need your help to get these messages out in all the channels if we are going to reach that critically important next generation of applicants and pharmacy students. What we know is that you have lots and lots of great material to use in these communications activities. This is where the knowledge management plan is activated. For the past six months we have been truly fortunate to have Dana Thimons in the AACP office serving as the Sewell Fellow. As an information scientist, Dana has studied the construct and practice of KM intensely while she delved into all the recesses of information within AACP. She has begun to embark on fieldtrips to member institutions and other associations so that she can more fully appreciate the rich sources of knowledge we hope to incorporate into our knowledge management framework and practices going forward. Her goal by the time her yearlong fellowship ends in December is to have designed the architecture of our KM system for implementation in 2016 and beyond.
There is one more area where we need to retool our communications to help reverse the trend of softening interest in pharmacy careers. Had I not been seated so far from the microphone at the end of the Council of Dean’s Open Forum yesterday, I likely would have run and hugged Peter Vlasses when he made his remark about the negative messages that have been seeded in both the professional and lay press about pharmacist unemployment, gluts and jobless futures. Earlier this year I drafted a Viewpoint for AJPE that was stimulated by the first article published by the Journal in 2015. The authors presented the hypothesis that a major disruption will soon be felt as pharmacists’ roles diverge into dispensing and nondispensing roles and the size of the dispensing cohort shrinks precipitously. I used the title “Lay Your Weapons Down”, making the point that such messaging was shooting us all in our proverbial feet and contributing to the downward trends in applications to our schools. I elected not to submit the editorial in the end so as not to draw additional attention to the original Viewpoint.
Strategically, we have so much we need to do over the next 3-5 years to fulfill our responsibilities as leaders of pharmacy and health care. While I was struck by the power of the messages in The End of College, I was simultaneously pleased that there was nothing contained in Carey’s analysis that our standing and special committees and task forces had not already assessed. We have bountiful recommendations to guide our strategic planning. Last year’s Strategic Planning Committee has recommended embarking upon the development of a new plan and our goal will be to bring the framework of a bold, visionary and aspirational plan to the Interim Meeting in Tampa in February for initial input and discussion.
The 2016 House of Delegates will most likely be asked to act to adopt the plan in keeping with the responsibilities of the House. Educational innovation, leadership, and outreach to inform the public and other stakeholders of pharmacists’ vital roles in value-driven health delivery systems will undoubtedly be significant drivers of that plan. Your input will be vital to our success in both the planning and implementation of the new plan.
- © 2015 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy
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