The earliest version of quizbank is now on wordpress! I have changed the progress bar to reflect this, and now all questions that I write will go directly into quizbank saving some extra work. There is a bit to be desired yet, but it is exciting to have it up and running!
Nose to the Grindstone
Well I keep working on questions. I finished another seven this week. Fellowship keeps me plenty busy and I have been lagging a little behind on getting the questions into electronic form, but not too far off of pace. We are looking at a January beta for people to try before SAEs hit. Also planning on meeting next week to do some beta planning. There is always this balance between getting it out there, and having it polished. I think you will like what we have to offer once we get it up and going.
(We’ll see how many titles I can come up with for these posts that all basically say the same thing 😉 )
Plugging away
I have been making some progress on writing the questions. Interestingly, a number of them that I was going to write I have been having some difficulty corroborating the answers for. As most of you probably know there is a paucity of high quality evidence for a number of things we do in PM&R. This makes writing questions a bit more tricky. Nonetheless, I have more or less been sticking to my goal of at least a question per day. I often end up knee deep in PubMed, which makes it a little slower going.
I also have a number of side projects for the website that I hope to get to. One that I think most of you will find helpful is corrections to Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Board Review (Cuccurullo second edition). Studying for my own boards and writing questions for the website has brought a number of these to light. I am roughly halfway done with that page and plan to have it up an available in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes open for that.
Moving along
I was able to work through more of the Rheumatology questions, and now have started on MSK questions. The first one was simple enough, but took considerable time formatting and getting the pictures to do what I wanted. I typically use GIMP (a free picture editor with similar capabilities to photoshop) but find that certain things are just not that easy to do. So after spending 15 minutes trying to figure out my particular problem I switched to paint and did it in 15 seconds.
More tech/capabilities does not always equal better. I think my attending who taught me amputee medicine would agree with that! Anyway, have been chipping away at the questions and have completed 6 more. I also spent considerable time working on a procedure logger for fellowship. Has a lot of nice features and some limitations that I am still working on. See you next week!
Bankart lesion picture: Original Author: RSatUSZ. Derivative:PMRRC.com
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
First Update
Question Progress
This is the first update post for PMRRC.com. We have had a very productive summer so far. One of the main changes was switching from Joomla to wordpress. This initially has set us back as far as progress on the site goes, as learning a new content management system takes some time. However, wordpress is very easy to use and should make things smoother as we move along.
We have received and continue to receive surveys regarding the test engine on Joomla all of which have been very positive and motivating so thank you for that! All in all there have been over 1100 unique people that have tried practice tests on the old site. Considering the amount of advertising we did (N approaches 0) that isn’t so bad.
As you can see there are ~350 questions that are in some form of completion. The vast majority have stems and answers. I just need to start in on the explanations and rounding out some more references. Finding pictures or creating pictures takes considerable time, but I feel it is necessary to provide clear explanations. Once all the questions have stems, answers, explanations, and references I will start asking staff that work in the related field what they think about the questions and make changes. Once this is completed it will go to our professional editor to knock out the grammatical mistakes. Finally, it is added to the quizbank. Right now the progress bar is for those questions that have completed the first step: stem/answers/explanations/references. I hope to have the process near completion by July 15th 2013. Meaning I need to get a little over 1 question done per day. I hope to track my progress here.