Case Study – Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

Case Study – Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

Background

Wake Forest University School of Medicine offers 14 graduate programs via the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in addition to an MD via its Medical School, and a 2-year Physician Assistant program. All these programs are based at the university’s Medical Campus. A total of 924 students are currently enrolled in the various programs, and there are also close to 1,000 teaching, research, and clinical faculty.

The campus’s Software Committee – headed by Mr. Kevin Brewer, whom we interviewed for the case study – actively looks for software that could be beneficial to the student body, and makes decisions as to which software packages to license. A faculty member who was using a trial version of Net Snippets brought it to the software committee’s attention, and after testing the program the committee decided to purchase a 2000-user site license for the Medical Center campus, starting in 2004.

Reasons for the decision:

1. Student need to organize disparate research materials
The students have access to many different types of materials – open-access websites, online databases, numerous electronic journals, and subscription-based medical reference sites such as MDConsult. They needed a way to save and interfile together the material in different formats from all these sources.

2. The needs of collaborative research
The students in the medical school and the Physician Assistant program often work in small groups on a medical “case study” which requires them to conduct extensive research on a “case” and share the information in the course of the assignment. They did not have a software package which made it easy to do this.

3. Good interface with the browser
The committee members liked the unobtrusive nature of Net Snippets: a browser plugin which looks and feels familiar, yet makes it much easier to organize web information than the browser itself does.

4. Text editing and information management capabilities
The committee especially liked Net Snippets’ ability to selectively save and edit both textual (and graphical) information and whole or partial screenshots, and to organize the material collected in folder hierarchies of any depth.

5. Attention to the needs of academic institutions
Additional pluses were Net Snippets’ automatic tracking of source citations, the ease of preparing a bibliography, and especially the ability to choose between the three most common academic formats for bibliographies: APA, MLA, or Chicago style.

Mr. Brewer estimated the need for a tool to organize research, such as Net Snippets, among the student population of a typical university to be about 7 on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high).

Introducing Net Snippets to the student population

One problem faced by most universities after acquiring a site license for new software, is to bring it to the attention of the intended user population (in this case: graduate students) and ensure that they will make use of it. Wake Forest University School of Medicine decided on the following strategy, which Mr. Brewer recommends to other academic institutions:

The university distributed and installed the software for the incoming 1st-year students (MD, Physician-Assistant and graduate students). Each computer “image” had the Net Snippets software preinstalled.
Students already at the university (2nd to 5th year students, depending on the program) were e-mailed an explanation of Net Snippets’ capabilities, together with a link to download it.
Use of the software is taught at obligatory training sessions for new students (and faculty), which are part of the orientation program.
The university runs periodic surveys among the student body, to check the degree of use of the software packages installed, and get feedback.

The Results

1. A high degree of use of Net Snippets by the student population
The university’s survey shows that of the 220 students to whom they distributed Net Snippets last year, over one half (about 52%) actually use it. “This is a good result compared to other IT tools,” Mr. Brewer explains. “Net Snippets is an advanced tool, so you can only expect a maximum of 50-60% use. Not everyone is capable of the conceptual changes needed to utilize a new tool. There will always be people who’ll just go on doing things the old way, whatever you offer them.”

2. “Those who use it, love it”
-- said Mr. Brewer. The students rated it high for ease of use and functionality. 50% of the students said they use it “frequently”.

3. Flexibility in organizing research
The students can organize their research by class or by themes; and they can group and merge the research for case studies. They are not required to hand in assignments in the form of Net Snippets reports, and the university does not track their use of individual functions such as the report generator, but Mr. Brewer knows that they do make extensive use of the automatic bibliography generator.

“We’re in the beginning stages of evaluating,” Mr. Brewer comments. “Perhaps later we’ll add questions about specific functionality, such as generating reports, or use for collaborative work.” Overall, the university is very happy with the site license and the increased functionality that Net Snippets enables them to offer the student population.