Distance Learing

Management Information Systems

My article on on-line teaching, Leveraging Technology to Educate New Healthcare IT Leaders, will appear in the Summer 2011 edition of the Journal of Healthcare Information Management. Download a copy> Leveraging

I have been a Visiting Professor since 1997 in the Executive MBA in Health Administration, offered by the Network for Healthcare Management, an educational collective consisting of fourteen universities across the U.S., including the University of Colorado at Denver. I teach a course in Management Information Systems for managers from across the U.S. and Canada though on-campus sessions and computer conferencing.

Click on Management Information Systems to download a copy of the syllabus (Adobe Acrobat Reader required). The conferencing software used is FirstClass.

How Shall We Meet On-line? Choosing Between Videoconferencing And On-line Meetings

This article appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of the Journal of Healthcare Information Management, published by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)

Videoconferencing and on-line meetings can save travel time and money, while encouraging frequent communication among managers and clinicians. This article describes what videoconferencing and on-line meeting technologies are available now, and suggests criteria for selecting which one to use.

To download this paper in PDF format , click the link below.

http://www.himss.org/content/files/jhim/16-4/Section 18 - OriginalContrib3.pdf

Which Technology for Distance Learning?

I wrote an article on this subject for the Summer, 1998 edition of CONNECT, the magazine of NYU's Academic Computing Facility (http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/archives/98summer/kropfdistance.html)

The article was prompted by my experience in co-teaching a video course with a colleague at NYU that connected faculty and students at NYU with the University of Paris. At that time, I had finished teaching a course on the Internet for the first time (Management Information Systems for the Network for Healthcare Management).

The difference in my experience with the two courses was striking. The assumption that video contact would make a classroom more personal turned out to be the opposite. There was little contact between students and faculty via video-conferencing, in comparison to spirited debate, humor and camaraderie in a course based on what was fundamentally a sophisticated email system.

In this article, I explore not whether one medium is superior, but the question of how we should go about choosing. If I were writing the article today, I would pose a different question. Since it is increasingly possible to use video, chat and other synchronous (real-time) methods of communication on the Internet, the question is now WHEN to use a medium, not WHICH one to use.

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