Zee Designs

The University of Southern Nevada started as the Nevada College of Pharmacy, a private, non-profit institution, and Zee Designs has been there since the very beginning.

The Nevada College of Pharmacy began as an idea from one person, Dr. Harry Rosenberg. Dr. Rosenberg’s idea was that pharmacy education should be and could be better, more effective, and capable of producing highly competent graduates who would be sought-after by employers regardless of the job market.

A curriculum was developed that emphasized a student-centered, active learning environment where students were participating in experiential education from the very beginning of the program. Rather than semesters or quarters, the curriculum was organized into blocks that allowed students to take one course at a time. Students would be in class from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. allowing them ample time to concentrate and focus on achieving the desired outcomes. It would provide opportunities for students to be active participants in the learning process by using a variety of learning activities rather than the traditional lecture format. Moreover, the early pharmacy practice experiences were designed to enhance and support the didactic curriculum by allowing students to actually see, feel, and understand what was presented in the classroom in an actual pharmacy setting.

The University began its history with the development of the Nevada College of Pharmacy, a truly unique and innovative college that subscribes to pedagogical ideals, one of which is:

• Frequent assessment, feedback, and mechanisms to address any deficiencies are necessary to ensure mastery of content.

USN was looking for a way to efficiently collect data from student assessments. The solution?

This is where Zee Designs comes in. They appreciated the way we built their website which was powered by the ZD-CMS™ and its easy-on-the-eyes, intuitive interface. They asked us if we could build a way for them to keep track of their Community of people including administrators, faculty, staff, students and preceptors (teaching pharmacists). We said, "Sure!" Our client-specific, extranet solution started there.

Soon after, they were showing us lengthy Assessment Forms which asked students to evaluate their experience of working with and learning from the preceptors. In reverse, preceptors were asked to make their assessment of the students' abilities. This assessment process happens at the end of every block. Literally thousands of assessments were being processed, at the time, in paper format, so we created mechanisms which include a nitty-gritty search feature where they can dial in to an exact assessment, student, preceptor, block, form, question, and answer. We've built dozens of data queries and reports for them to learn details they never were able to know before. If a student or preceptor is having challenges, they learn about it right away and take action to provide the necessary support for a successful educational outcome.

Since that time, we have developed many features, modules, and applications that eventually became the EDU-CMS™, the Educational Content Management System™, to handle the tasks of managing the students' experiential training, rotations, numerous email reminders, feedback forms, facility relationships, and more. There is little that compares to our feeling when they call us saying, "We cannot live without this. It has changed the lives of so many of us here. We love it! To top it all off, it has saved us a significant amount of money and resources which we can now spend in other areas."

Do we at Zee Designs find our jobs rewarding? You betcha!

• About USN's History - Full Version