Wayne McCormack, PhD
University of Florida

It's time to get registered for the 2014 annual meeting of the TBLC and work on travel plans! We look forward to seeing you in Fort Worth, Texas during March 6-8, 2014. Early Bird registration ends January 17th, so be sure to register early to take advantage of the discount for early registration. Detailed program information is available at the TBLC website. We are excited this year to have on our program Eric Mazur as our opening plenary speaker, and Larry Michaelsen as our closing plenary speaker. And of course in between those sessions you will have lots of opportunities to immerse yourself in TBL fundamentals, recent innovations, and research & scholarship in team-based learning workshops. With two sessions of short oral presentations and two opportunities to view posters, we will have plenty of opportunities to share TBL experiences and learn from each other.

A "first" for our 2014 TBLC annual conference will be the announcement of our first-ever "TBL Research Grant" awards. The Research & Scholarship Committee is reviewing 17 applications, and is anticipated to select two to four projects to support new educational research or evaluation proposals in 2014-2015. We hope this program supports and encourages research and scholarship in team-based learning, and leads to collaborative projects across the TBLC community.

Thank you to those of you who responded to our request for volunteers to serve on our working committees. We continue to need new members on our committees to help our organization accomplish its goals. Please look for committee members at the conference, ask them about their goals and ongoing projects, and consider adding your expertise to committees you are interested in. We will also have a designated time to meet with committee members at the annual conference. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our present committee members for all the work they do as we strive to transform and support education through Team-Based Learning at all levels and in all fields.

See you in Fort Worth!

Paul Erickson, Michele C. Clark, Sue Armitage
University of Nevada Las Vegas

Team Based Learning (TBL) offers students active engagement and opportunities to practice higher levels of learning. When using this evidence based teaching strategy the readiness assurance process is a critical activity to prepare students for the application exercises. However, when incorporating one of TBL's important principles - frequent and immediate feedback in an online platform - one encounters challenges. It is not difficult to create the Individual Readiness Assurance Tests (I-RAT) in most online platforms. However, creating the T-RAT presents unique challenges, especially for an asynchronous online course. The goal for the online program using TBL was to create an online scratch off that would provide students with immediate feedback on their answers for the T-RAT.

To accomplish this, the UNLV School of Nursing and the UNLV Office of Online Education decided to implement the activity in three components:

In short the online T-RAT scratch off works like this:

Since responses (both incorrect and correct, and in the order chosen) are stored in the database the instructor can review these data in a dashboard to determine which questions the students are having difficulty with, and which responses may be the most misleading.

Once the group has completed all of the questions they can return to the discussion area to decide if the appeal process would be appropriate for any of the questions.
For specific questions about this process feel free to email Paul Erickson

In a future article the Scenario Based TBL activity will be described. This activity includes a question, a single response, and the group submitting a collaborative defense explaining why they choose their response.

Sandy Cook, Scott Compton, Robert Kamei
DUK-NUS Graduate Medical School

While many of the early TBL pioneers (Larry Michaelsen, Dean Parmelee, Ruth Levine, to name just a few) have been traveling the world, preaching the gospel of TBL and making significant impact - we wanted to share a bit with you of the impact being made in Singapore and by Singapore. In 2006, one of the first American Style Medical Schools was started in Singapore as a joint partnership with Duke and National University of Singapore - Duke-NUS. From the beginning, we chose TBL to enrich our student learning and were graciously mentored and encouraged by Dean and Larry.

Being inspired, we wanted to share our enthusiasm and expertise with others who were developing educational activities in Southeast Asia. One of our first projects was in Cambodia in 2010. They have a great need to improve the practicing health professionals in basic preventive and public health issues such as hygiene, immunizations, obstetrics, but have few trained physicians available to teach. In addition, the idea of learning in teams was foreign to Cambodia and yet traditional learning did not engage them in changing practice. Working closely with a local Non-Government Organization (NGO), we helped set up TBL modules for a Nurse Midwife education program and a Continuing Medical Education program for physicians. These programs were accepted extremely well and were considered a great success. We were also invited to Tanzania in 2010, to share this concept with the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical School (KCMC), a partner with Duke University in developing medical education in Africa. They too were inspired to begin to change the educational framework to deliver medical education for their new school (Nyindo M, Kitau J, Lisasi E, Kapanda G, Matowo J, Francis P, Bartlett J (in press). Introduction of Team-Based Learning (TBL) at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College: Experience with the Ectoparasites Module. Medical Teacher, 2014.)

Having these two successes and an ever growing set of invitations to share our experience and expertise (in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, and Philippines, to name a few), in 2012 we implemented a TBL fellowship program here in Singapore (FTBL). Our first cohort was made up of 26 people from 6 different countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Tanzania) including a variety of fields outside of medicine. They have each introduced TBL in some fashion in their schools. Fifteen returned for a follow-up session and to share their successes and challenges as well as explored more robust evaluation strategies. Our second cohort included 12 people from five different countries (China, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and Vietnam). We are pleased to hear reports of their successful use of TBL in their settings. We are planning our third cohort and are working with the pharmaceutical industry who want to explore using TBL to train staff. But the area that we are most proud is the impact we have had at Duke University and in Singapore. At Duke School of Medicine, they have introduced versions of TBL starting in 2012. In fact, Duke's beautiful new medical education building was specifically designed to support TBL. And many Duke undergraduate programs at Duke have begun to implement TBL as well. In Singapore, the newest medical school, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, has fully embraced TBL as their instructional strategy with our support and encouragement. And most recently the Ministry of Education (MOE) is exploring introducing versions of TBL in their primary and secondary educational systems, with over 100 teachers and principals coming to our workshops to learn more about TBL. (http://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/news/new-singapore-school-experiments-duke-nus-team-based-learning-approach) A few brave teachers dared to bridge the cultural divide and have demonstrated that engaged students can go beyond rote memorization and even enjoy learning through the use of TBL.

It was never a surprise to us that TBL would work in Asia - but we did not imagine having such a broad impact.