IT Training - University of Florida

Technology Conversation – EP. 15 

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Welcome to our podcast Technology Conversations, where we discuss technology related topics from how to find resources for your technology needs to how technology can impact our lives. My name is Anchalee Phataralaoha and I will be your host. 

With us today is Assistant Director of Enrollment Marketing with the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, Rachel DiSesa. Hello Rachel, how are you today?

Rachel DiSesa: Hi Anchalee, thank you so much for thinking of us.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Yes, and thank you for being here. First off, how long have you been with UF?

Rachel DiSesa: I’ve been actually with the University since 2006. I stated out with the College of Veterinary Medicine and I was working with referring veterinarians to bring teaching cases for the Small Animal Hospital. The Small Animal Hospital over there is the largest small animal hospital in the country. The College of Veterinary Medicine actually has four different hospitals under its umbrella. So great chance to talk to people in the community. I really learned a lot more about animal health and medicine in general--how animal health relates to human and environmental health. I was fortunate to be able to earn my Master and PhD from IFAS. During that same time period I researched the professional education and how communication can improve patient outcomes in both animals and in humans. I’ve been with the College of Pharmacy since 2023 and as you said I lead the enrollment marketing team within the Office of Lifelong Learning.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So what exactly do you do with your position? Do you kind of promote enrollment for the College?

Rachel DiSesa: Yes, my job is to reach out to working professionals and adult learners and introduce them to the journey of lifelong learning. Most of our students in the online graduate program are working professionals – they are attorneys, they are medical doctors, they are first responders, anyone in the health profession. They are people that are interested in furthering their career or they are managers who reach out to us to upskill or reskill their entire workforce. So we have a lot of programs that are not specifically falling under the umbrella of Pharmacy per se that are really exciting and use technology to be able to reach a lot of different fields, a lot of different people all over the world.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: How many students are enrolled within the College of Pharmacy?

Rachel DiSesa: So our PharmD and PhD program or what we call Residential Program has about 160 students on three campuses here in Florida. We are actually ranked number 4 nationally out of 140 colleges of Pharmacy. So we’re really proud of that. We just a couple years ago celebrated our 100th anniversary so very much a legacy school and we are very proud of all our students and subject matter experts that we have as our faculty. 

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Can you outline different programs that the College offers?

Rachel DiSesa: Yes, in addition to the traditional PharmD curriculum where I spend most of my efforts is in the online graduate education world, that makes up 6-7 departments which are Forensic Science, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Clinical Toxicology, Clinical Pharmacogenomics & Precision Medicine, Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, and then Pharmaceutics. Those are the departments that all have online Master’s and graduate certificate programs designed for working professionals.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So it sounds like it is very extensive for the online offerings. Compare to traditional like let say face-to-face, in-person, the population of online students compared to in-person what is the ratio if you have any numbers?

Rachel DiSesa: As I said we have about 160 residential students and we have over 1,000 online graduate students at any given time. Again since most of our, many of our courses are asynchronous, they cross different time zones. These are working professionals; they may be working all day long and juggling the responsibilities of family. We say work-life balance doesn’t really exist anymore; it’s the work-life integration. So we really take that into consideration. We have an amazing distance education, support staff team that is solely dedicated to helping students succeed. They understand that working professionals and online graduate students have very different needs than some of our traditional, in-person students. We have a very dedicated team, whether that is reaching out for the Registrar Office, the Bursar Office, or helping them with Canvas getting online again. There’s a lot of support so that technology doesn’t become a roadblock for our students who may not have been in school for a while.  

Anchalee Phataralaoha: I suppose you have students from all over the world.

Rachel DiSesa: We actually have some partnership agreements with schools in some other countries so that we can help their students navigate through our system so that they can be successful.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So tell me about the technologies that you all use for the online programs that bring it so much success.

Rachel DiSesa: I’m going to really focus on one of our programs that I want to highlight, our forensic science program. We’re actually celebrating our 25th anniversary and why I think this is so important in relation to technology is if you think back 25 years, certainly we didn’t have the mobile technology that we have now. Not everybody even have laptops so some of our students were in the position where they had to work all day, and then they couldn’t go into a Starbucks or something, you know (they) didn’t have that mobile technology, didn’t have an iPad (so) they had to go. Now they have home office maybe; they might have the family computer that they would have to share with other people. So some of our students even had to Fedex their coursework to get it in on time. These are still back in the days some people had dial-up and some were in rural communities. You think back to some of these challenges that our students had way back then we were kind of able to pave the way for some of our more recent programs not only in University of Florida, but other online graduate programs, other Forensic online programs. We were the leaders in this technology. So we are really, really proud of that. One of the terms that we like to use is  telepresence technology, which is one of the ways that we were able to expand our programs. And that kind of refers to using Zoom, using synchronous methods for being able to actually see your instructors even though you weren’t in the same time zones.  Forensic Science again is one of our greatest programs because all of their courseworks are now asynchronous. So when you are travelling for work in Europe, you’re still able to complete your course. You don’t have to worry about waking up at 3 o’clock in the morning just try to listen to a lecture. And so we really think that using technology in that manner has been a big advantage to how we were able to expand our program. We also use educational technology in the sense of when we originally came on board, not all our materials were available online and many things that were pdf, certainly Acrobat pdf documents were not where they are now. So they were really just images that you’d have to thumb through. So we’re really fortunate now that the technology has a lot really integrated these resources and made them not just copies of printed materials, but very helpful, intuitive learning accessories through educational technology.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Out of curiosity what are the technologies that people used way back then, let say maybe 20 somethings years ago when Zoom didn’t exist, right?

Rachel DiSesa: Before we had Zoom, we would have bulletin board systems that didn’t look anything like the Canvas chat features that we have now and the postings that we have. There are iterations of Blackboard way back when.  Especially for someone who has been out of school, people who weren’t living in the academic world like we do, this is really foreign technology so there are certainly a learning curve. And again going back to having a dedicated team to help out distance learners--that’s one of the ways that we were/have been so successful I think. We don’t expect our student to just figure it out.  We want to absolutely champion the success of every one of our working professional students.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So distance learners..the graduation time period do they graduate? Let say the length of the program is it the same as the in-person program?

Rachel DiSesa: Most of our Master’s students finish the program in 2-3 years, typically 32-35 credit hours and so it’s about 2-3 years for somebody that’s working. Our graduate certificates are shorter than that--sometimes 9-12 credit hours and they can be usually completed in as few as 2-3 semesters. So the time commitment is about one semester more than would be for traditional residential campus students.

One thing that I really enjoy and look forward to is in the springtime we have an actual in-person commencement ceremony for our online learners. Some of them this is the first time they step foot on our campus. But we have a wonderful commencement ceremony with our residential PharmD pharmacist students and then afterwards we have our own reception with the friends and family of our online graduate students. It’s really, really nice. It really shows them that they are absolutely part of the Gator Nation. They are alumni of the University of Florida and of course we hope that they will continue to stay in the field that they have chosen and look to us for continuing education and networking opportunities.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So they get to meet each other in person for the very first time.

Rachel DiSesa: Yes, yes, we have our faculty come, we have our support staff come. It’s in the stadium. You know just a really nice send off and a way that we can really show them that while they may not have sat in the Howard Hall of the University of Florida, they are absolutely alumni of this program.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: If people would like to learn more about the offerings and all the programs that you have, who they can reach out to?

Rachel DiSesa: All of our information is on the Pharmacy website. We also have a short URL, go.ufl.edu/lifelonglearning.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Sounds good. Any parting words or final thoughts?

Rachel DiSesa: So one last word I would like to share is that all of our instructors are working professionals, they are subject matter experts in their fields. We feel that using technology ethically and responsibly by integrating our real world instructors is one of the things that makes our programs so successful. In the future we see virtual labs, VR/AR labs. But at the heart of this again always come back to people and using the technology as I said ethically and responsibly—something we’re very, very proud of with the College of Pharmacy.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Thank you Rachel for being with us today.

Rachel DiSesa: Thank you so much. This is a great opportunity to show off what we do at the College of Pharmacy.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: That’s it everyone. And we will see you next time for a topic of interest in IT.