Students, Staff Rise to the COVID-19 Challenge

As the Director of the Center for Faculty Educators, you don’t normally interact with students a lot, but you’ve been supporting their volunteer efforts. Can you tell us a bit about what you’re doing? 

When this opportunity was brought to me by the Deans, many of the volunteer ideas were already compiled, but we needed to figure out how to operationalize them. I’ve been helping the student leaders facilitate conversations with appropriate leadership throughout the campus, including UCSF Health and ZSFG campus. Some examples of items I’ve helped with are ensuring that a review process of health literacy materials is followed, including translating documents about COVID-19.

UCSF students coordinating supply donations have gotten a lot of attention, are there other ways that medical students are helping? 

Yes! In collaboration with Vitalant, a local blood collection agency, they’ve coordinated two blood drives to be held on various campuses, developed health literacy materials in various languages such as What is COVID19, developed videos like Myths and Truths about COVID19, provided emergency childcare services for the health care workforce, provided grocery delivery services via Meals on Wheels, participated in virtual and phone social visits with seniors at various community senior assisted living centers, to name a few!

Do you have any learnings from working on something that is very new to you that you could share with the team? 

I might not consider this a new learning, but this level of direct interaction with our students has given me firsthand experience of how AMAZING and COMMITTED our students are! Also, the exposure to the various departments and processes throughout the campus has been very informative. 

Much of the curriculum has gone remote. What does that actually mean in practice?

It's been pretty amazing. Everyone has stepped up to keep the curriculum going so our students can keep advancing. There are many lectures and dozens of small groups each week which usually happen in a classroom like setting and all these had to be converted to Zoom based activities. In a very short time, we went from using Zoom for meetings to having much of our first year learning activities take place online. The faculty, coordinators, and students all embraced this and made the change very quickly to keep the students learning and moving forward. The coordinators are very impressive with a big nod to Betsy Norton, Amy Yun, and others with Liz Austin supervising.

How has the team supported this?

The team has been developing best practices and training our teams in how to use Zoom then this all went big very fast. Jill Bond, Chantilly Apollon and Sam Chung are leaders in this area of online and remote learning. They meet with each instructor and course directors to train them and then are there for each session as it went live in Zoom to troubleshoot and coach them. Tim Galbreath is great at technical support for remote learning. He helped us do things in Zoom we didn't know were possible. Also, Gina Merriwether volunteered from her role in the Post Bac program to help and Joey Bernal volunteered from CME to help the team. Sam and Joey are doing R&D in ZOOM to meet the upcoming needs. I will say the biggest thing is everyone on the team is very passionate about making the best learning experience.

Your team is often seen as our Zoom experts. What is something you’ve learned since starting to work on this that you didn’t know before?

Zoom Bombing is one thing that's new to me. This is where an unwanted guest crashes your zoom session and tries to disrupt it (use a password). The other thing is that this experience is changing us all and I see more and more people wanting to use video conferencing in amazing ways. After all this settles down, we may continue to use video conferencing in new ways.