International Peer Review Project

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The International Peer Project is a project designed to encourage the development of global citizenship, professionalism, and communication skills using the community of inquiry in a text-based environment conceptual framework developed by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer. The project is hosted on a highly specialized web-platform www.diastemas.net (Diastemas) which was/is funded by the U21 Health Sciences Group.

Diastemas allows the establishment of digital learning communities between students from University of British Columbia (UBC), University of Birmingham (UB), Hong Kong University (HKU), University of Amsterdam (UA), Tec de Monterrey, and University of California San Francisco (UCSF).  All students from U21 participating schools are encouraged to use the platform.  Presently the learning communities are formed with Operative dental students from the clinical simulation level of training.  In addition, UBC has initiated vertical integration into the communities by including students from all 4 years of the curriculum in a lurker, novice, regular, elder hierarchy whereby lurkers and novices learn from the regular and elder students.

Drs. Damien Walmsley, Susan Bridges and Karen Gardner at ADEA conference 2011

A faculty workshop was hosted in Vancouver in June 2009, a poster presentation including the project was presented by Dr. Karen Gardner at the ADEA 2010 conference in Washington DC, Drs. Karen Gardner, Susan Bridges and Damien Walmsley hosted a Faculty workshop at the ADEA 2011 meeting in San Diego California, and pedagogical research is on-going. Upgrades are planned for Diastemas and a paper was accepted by the European Journal Of Dental Education to be published in May 2012.

Contacts

Karen Gardner