I started my course on December 10th. Registering was relatively easy, though the amount of time that I had to spend on the phone was daunting, simply because I wasn’t actually expecting to be contacted so quickly! I had submitted a request for information online and within a few minutes, I was in a phone call that lasted almost 45 minutes while I was escaping snowballs from my youngest kid. I was registered by the end of the day, had submitted my BC Student loan application, and by the next day I was off to the races and started my course.

The course is divided into five milestones, which are laid out in a microsoft Excel document that is emailed to you so that you can plan your progress according to a suggested timeline. The course is stretched out with estimated completion dates over the course of 52 weeks based on a 22 hours per week minimum investment. The course is designed for you to be able to go at your own pace, however, so it isn’t unusual to have it completed long before that 52 week period. If you need more time, you can communicate with you Student Services Representative and let them know what challenges you are facing. So far, the general feel for the program is that it is filled with staff members who are happy to help you along in your journey towards your new career.

With that all said, let’s get on with how I fared this first week! Here is the content that I trucked through this week:

Week One of Medical Transcriptionist / Healthcare Documentation Specialist Program

• Introduction and Student Code of Conduct (Estimated 2 hours)
• Program Orientation, Orientation Course Test, and Orientation Survey (Estimated 14 hours)
• Computer Fundamentals (Estimated at 13 hours)
  • Beginning your Computer Training
  • Windows 10
    • Level 1
    • Level 2
    • Quiz
  • Microsoft Outlook (Estimated 14 hours)
    • Outlook Level 1
    • Outlook Level 2
    • Quiz
  • Microsoft Word (Estimated 14 hours)
    • Word Level 1
    • Word Level 2
    • Quiz
  • Microsoft Excel (Estimated 13 hours)
    • Level 1
    • Quiz
  • Computer Fundamentals Course Test
• Personal Financial Planning

Review and Comments Regarding Computer Fundamentals

The Computer Fundamentals modules were mind numbing for me. The modules go over basic and slightly advanced tips and tricks for working with things like Windows 10, Microsoft Excel, Word, and Outlook. The contents include creating a new windows account, how to navigate your PC, using Microsoft Office programs, formatting emails, and creating excel documents. Unfortunately, this included things like how to scroll. It was not easy what-so-ever to skip through areas that were redundant.

In Outlook, topics included (definitely not limited to this) flagging emails for reviews, using flags to help create task lists/to-do lists, using those flagged items to create reminder alerts, adding items to calendars, checking that meetings or other items don’t interfere with existing planned events.

Using “Journal” to see what you have completed or what things you had worked on during the select interval time. You can also update your work week and hours of availability using Outlook. Creating messages, formatting messages, sending emails, responding to emails, forwarding emails, using special stationary, templates, and styles — including creating personal templates to use with certain individuals or companies.

Using outlook to Styles, which are a pre-set format using options you can select for messages, meeting requests, tasks, journal items and other available tasks. As well as themes, the module explains ways to setup multiple email addresses for yourself and how to alternate between which email address you send from.

They also explain how to setup a scheduled email delivery and how to turn on or off read receipts. You can also create voting buttons, which is a new-to-me feature!

Word education was about creating a new document, using templates, using the design ribbon to customize the look of your document, inserting watermarks, headers, footers… Basic things.

Excel was mostly just a very basic understanding, which I think most people would have a basic understanding of if you have ever used excel. Definitely nothing advanced.

My Thoughts: This education was incredibly tedious and daunting for myself, but I can see that it would be incredibly helpful for students who are new to the tech world! I wish that there were a way to skip over these modules as they were incredibly long to sit through as a more advanced user.

I did find the quizzes at the end of the learning modules to be difficult to do because I found the wording a bit “off” even though they did make sense, it just took me a little longer than it should have to try and decipher what it was they were asking of me. The quizzes were based off of keyboard and mouse clicks that were registered without any indication of such, so I would click things multiple times without intending to. I lost a few marks for doing this as there is a set number of clicks as well as a time limit for some of the action-type questions.

Review of Personal Financial Planning

This was a neat course to throw in for people who will primarily be working from home and something that should be taught in high school. For this mini course, we are brought to Enriched Academy to go through several lessons and quizzes. Financial education is severely lacking in our education system right now and this module would be an excellent one to provide in Career and Personal Development classes in our primary education.

The course consisted of a relatively comprehensive workbook and multiple videos in each lesson that was followed by an end of lesson quiz consisting of 10 questions, of which you had to get at least 7 correct in order to continue on.

Supplemental tools provided in this course offering include tools to Crush Your Debt, Net Worth Tracker, Annual Savings Calculator, Workbooks, Calculators & Tools; and Your Consumer Disclosures.

Topics covered: Money Myths, Understanding Credit, Student Loans, Where are you Today, and Career Mastery.

Facts that stood out to me:

• 4.8 million people in Canada live below the poverty line.
• Practical Money Skills, Canada survey showed 90% of Canadians have more debt to day than they did 5 years ago. Only 47% of Canadians use a budget.
• The biggest cause of mismanaged money is not paying attention to how much you are spending in your day-to-day life. Our goal should be 10% put away into savings.
• 3% of our earning should go into a retirement fund.
• Many wealthy individuals (77%) report that they are frugal.
• Good debt: Student loans, homes, investment properties, seminars, coaching, and books…. The latter 3 was odd to me.

Overall, it is a decent course but redundant for me at this point in my life. I already Ramsayed myself out of my consumer debt.

My Current Progress in CanScribe’s Medical Transcriptionist Training

I started the course December 10th at 9:30 am and ran into a few technical issues as I worked through the course. I wanted to be paced faster, but the layout of the modules made it so that I could only proceed at a certain speed. Rather than course material to read in order to consume knowledge, most of the course was interactive lessons that made it so that I was paced lower than I would have liked.

I completed the topics that I describe in this post. By December 11th at 8:30 am, I could no longer continue as I ran into a technical issue where there are no more modules available to me in my student dashboard. Unfortunately, it is a Saturday and there will be no staff in the office to help resolve this technical issue. I am now forced to sit back and relax!

The estimated completion date for where I am right now was January 1st, 2022 so I am a little ahead of schedule. I’m sure this will not be a continued trend as I work through the program! I was really hoping to get to the first milestone as quickly as possible. To get to milestone 1, I need to complete Keyboarding Techniques, Grammar & Style, and Medical Report Formatting. The total hours for those three modules are suggested at 78 hours or 24 days — bringing us to the suggested completion date for all of Milestone One modules to January 25th, 2022.

Let’s see how quickly we can get there 😉