Software developers at Queen’s University have officially launched a health sciences learning platform called Elentra that connects students, professors and curriculum virtually. The platform is also the first corporation ever owned by the university.
Based solely in Kingston, Ont., the corporation employs 17 people in the region and serves more than 30 institutions in Canada, the U.S.A., Singapore and the Middle East.
Over several years, the Queen’s School of Medicine’s IT department developed Elentra Corp in collaboration with 20 international medical schools. The business was incorporated by the university at the end of 2020 and officially launched on Tuesday.
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The platform includes features like cloud access to exams, assignments and to the grading system.
Although there are similar programs in the market, Faculty of Health Sciences dean Jane Philpott says students in health sciences programs recognized the need for a program tailored to medicine about fifteen years ago, so they created it from scratch.
“There are some really specific needs around medical education that were the birth of the Elentra system because we have specific training needs, like competency-based education, which indicates if a student is competent in their field,” Philpott says.
Elentra was initially used as a tool to organize data for the Queen’s School of Medicine’s accreditation process. Since then, it has developed into a program that addresses the academic needs of health sciences programs, including curriculum mapping, assessment and evaluation, and online exam delivery. The program has the ability to collect data and facilitate administrative and academic decision-making while prioritizing user experience.
“Elentra’s commercialization is a wonderful example of the university’s ability to cultivate innovation and drive change in post-secondary education,” says Queen’s principal and vice-chancellor, Patrick Deane.
