2023 Provost’s Emerging Technology Teaching & Learning Projects

Department of Surgery of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Catherine McManus and Sophie Mayeux

This project brings innovation and new ways to design teaching and learning in hands-on, hospital-based education using virtual reality (VR) simulation to improve medical students' professional, situational awareness, and teamwork foundational knowledge and skills in surgical environments. The operating room (OR) is a complex environment with many explicit and implicit rules requiring high situational awareness. Though OR staff are dedicated educators, they are generally focused on patient care and may be incompletely aware of the medical student's role. Medical students who are new to the OR environment must develop an understanding of the clinical, educational, and regulatory processes taking place around them. Because the variation in OR staff awareness of the student role and the processes that occur in the OR are interrelated and often implicit, it is challenging to deconstruct and describe what students need to know to thrive in the OR before they are there. The project will help elucidate the role of the student across all surgical subspecialties on which the student may rotate during their clerkships and teach the operating room (OR) specific knowledge with the "unwritten" rules. The goal is to create an immersive experience for the student to become accustomed to the OR and to teach the student the responsibilities and tasks related to the student role.

Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS) and Columbia Business School (CBS)

Zhou Yu and Michael Morris

Artificial intelligence has significantly progressed in developing "cognitive tutors" that teach technical skills. While technical skills are essential, professionals also need social competencies, such as negotiation tactics, to succeed. These competencies are hard to learn from a traditional classroom lecture because they involve reflexive behavioral habits. They are taught in MBA and JD programs through small seminars centered on role-play exercises and instructor coaching, which are expensive and limited in access. This project aims to address the gap in negotiation education by developing an automated coaching system. Current options for negotiation coaching are primarily in small workshops, which are costly and limited in access. An online AI-based negotiation trainer utilizing large language model technology that enables human-level play will give users the experience of verbal negotiations against strategically dynamic agents capable of human-level play, followed by tailored performance feedback, including a transcript of their conversation annotated with coaching about missed opportunities at different junctures in the negotiation.

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