University of California San Francisco
UCSF School of Medicine UCSF Medical Center

LabSpot

LabSpot is a tool in development by educational startup ResearchConnection, in close partnership with the UCSF School of Medicine, for designing, managing, tracking, and assessing students’ scholarly projects. LabSpot assists in the management of the entire scholarly project cycle and more, including:

  • Student-Mentor Pairing: Faculty/mentors and students find each other with a simple search and project opportunity posting infrastructure.
  • Curriculum Management and Project Tracking: Configure curriculum and organizational structure, track student progress, solicit and revise assignments, and send reminders.
  • Analytics and Assessment: Maintain an archive of student projects, track site usage, and benchmark cohorts across disciplines and years. Analyze outcomes at the granular or statistical level to gain insights and share reports.
  • Systems Integration: Keep things centralized with single sign-on integration, data dumps from any internal records of faculty profiles, and APIs to other CMS and LMS systems.

Getting Started with LabSpot:

  • Both students and mentors access the LabSpot tool via the same URL: https://ucsf.labspot.io/login
  • Users are asked to login via their UCSF MyAccess credentials and are taken to either a student or mentor landing page, based on their pre-assigned role in the system.
  • Creating a LabSpot Profile:
    • Students will be asked to set up their LabSpot profile by filling out a series of fields, including graduation year, area of concentration, and research interests
    • Mentors (occasionally referred to as researchers) will be asked to set up their LabSpot profile by adding their main topics of research, describing their research, department affiliation, personal bio, and education. For Mentors with a UCSF Profile, some of this information will already be prepopulated in LabSpot.