This year, UCAN is looking back on 15 years of collaborative research, development of innovative examination formats, sharing of resources, and the development, implementation and evaluation of assessment standards. For the 15th anniversary we have written an annual report which can be downloaded here.

This August, the Institute for Communication and Assessment Research was represented at the annual meeting of the virtual AMEE conference.

We would like to invite you to the next UCAN Virtual Conference 2021 on September 30, 2021. Please use the online form in the blog post to register.

The UCAN network is now the largest association of medical faculties at both national and international level. The exchange of exam questions and knowledge are essential pillars of our close cooperation. We are therefore very pleased that with the accession of the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University Hospital Jena, 65% of the German medical faculties are now members of the UCAN network. This speaks to the fact that more and more faculties are using and appreciating the UCAN tools for standardizing the assessment processes within their institution. We look forward to the new collaborations and welcome our new partners to UCAN.

We would have loved to meet you all in person for this special occasion, but unfortunately the pandemic does not allow for reliable planning. Therefore, we have decided to hold the UCAN conference virtually this year.

We would like to ask you to note the dates for the conference and the technical taskforce meeting in your calendars already now.

In order to give all UCAN partners, who are located in different time zones around the world, the opportunity to participate, we plan to meet in a time frame of about 10:00 – 16:30 UTC + 2 (German time: 12:00 – 18:30).

We will inform you about the preliminary program as well as the possibility to submit abstracts in due time. Please feel free to forward the information to interested colleagues.

We look forward to celebrating the UCAN anniversary together with you.

We would like to draw your attention to a very interesting blog post by our Canadian partners, the Touchstone Institute. In cooperation with UCAN, the exam of the “Internationally Educated Nurses Competency Assessment Program (IENCAP)” was digitized. The written part of the exam was administered using the ProgressTest wrapper, for which UCAN implemented an interface to an external proctoring provider to ensure a secure exam. The OSCE exam took place via Zoom with a custom dashboard. The examiners performed the assessment from their locations using the tOSCE app, thus the complete test was carried out digitally without media discontinuity.

On 26.01.2021, the first virtual training on the topic of “Creating good multiple-choice questions” took place with 34 participants and IMS authors from the Medical Faculty of Otto von Guerike University Magdeburg.

A very eventful year is coming to an end. Corona has turned many things upside down and has had a lasting impact on all areas of our private lives. Politics, business, the legal and health care systems, and education have also felt the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic. For you, it meant implementing the challenges and requirements in teaching and testing at your university as quickly as possible in order to be able to continue to provide a good education to your students.

Now it is finally time to sit back and rejoice in what we have achieved. We wish you a peaceful, reflective Christmas and a good start in a hopefully less exciting 2021!

The virtual conference of the “International Association for Medical Education” will take place from September 7 to 9, 2020. We will be there with the virtual UCAN booth no. 9 in the AMEE Arena 2 in the non-profit area. Create your avatar, visit us at our booth and learn more about our history, our areas of responsibility and assessment tools of the non-profit UCAN Assessment Network, one of the largest associations in the field of medical examinations. We look forward to meeting you!

Within the framework of a joint pilot project between the Fliedner Fachhochschule Düsseldorf (FFH), the Ostbayrische Technische Hochschule Amberg-Weiden (OTH-AW) and the UCAN Assessment Network, the first examination in the “Physician Assistance” course of studies was successfully completed.

Digital assessment is becoming more and more popular within medical education. To analyse the dimensions of this digital trend, we investigated how exam questions (items) are created and designed for use in digital medical assessments in Germany. Thus, we want to explore whether different types of media are used for item creation and if a digital trend in medical assessment can be observed.