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What was supervised, and what was learned

Working draft

This page is published for review. It will be completed and proofread before the site goes fully live.

The problem

A logbook filled in after the fact attests to everything and proves nothing: not the attendance, not the session, not the hour.

A clinical teacher supervises — a ward round, a case conference, a simulation session. It is their real work, and no trace of it remains. Not for them, who cannot prove what they did; not for the student, whose logbook stays empty; not for the institution, which does not know who is actually supervising.

The teaching act exists only from the first scan

The supervisor opens a session and displays a QR code that renews continuously, within a window of a few minutes. The students present scan it. This is the rule the whole module rests on:

A supervisor cannot declare that they supervised. If they open a session that no one scans, nothing happened. That is what separates a record of activity from a self-declaration.

A second rule matters just as much: time belongs to the session, exposure belongs to the student. A one-hour ward round with four residents is one hour of supervision — not four.

When a phone is not enough

Mobile scanning is not the only route: a ward can be fitted with a fixed reader, a printed card serves the student who has no smartphone, and manual entry remains possible — but it then records who entered it and why. It is never mistaken for a scan.

What the system watches for

Anomalies are detected and recorded, never silently corrected: two sessions by the same supervisor at the same moment, a volume of supervision no single day allows, or always the same people together — which betrays a routine rather than real supervision.

From counted time to a signed document

Each type of teaching act is worth a number of minutes, set by a versioned scale. The values are supplied blank, marked “to be defined”: the product refuses to invent what a ward round is worth. That is an institutional decision.

Each month a statement is drawn up for each supervisor, bounded by the attendance actually observed — no one supervises for longer than they were there — then countersigned by the line manager. And the product deliberately goes no further: that statement never counts towards a statutory quota. It counts; the institution concludes.

What TRACE does not do

Seeing TRACE at work

A demonstration instance is permanently open: a fictitious faculty, with its programmes, its cohorts, its logbooks and assessments already entered. Credentials are provided on request — the demonstration holds no real student data.

Open the demonstration of TRACE, in a new tabRequest access to the TRACE demonstration