Abstract:

Medical schools and other health professional training programs must regularly meet both accreditation and academic standards, a mandate which has led to the development of an e-content management process in medical education called curriculum mapping. As scientific content constantly expands, often the curriculum that is currently taught is different from the originally developed materials and based on out-dated goals and standards. Through the process of curriculum mapping, accreditors, administrators, faculty, and students can easily see how current topics align with updated institutional, professional, and international standards.

American University of the Caribbean (AUC) School of Medicine, a four-year international medical school based in Sint Maarten with clinical sites distributed across the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), has recently undertaken its first e-curriculum mapping project using the Ilios Curriculum Management System (Ilios) originally developed by the University of California San Francisco. An experienced team of medical educators and technology specialists engaged faculty, recent graduates, and current students in the mapping process via the medical school’s Curriculum Committee. In the first stage, AUC aligned their institutional objectives with gold standards, known as competencies, which were developed by the US-based Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). The multidisciplinary team then systematically mapped ACGME competencies to AUC objectives, from program objectives all the way down to course and individual session objectives. With access to the entire curriculum, faculty can now more easily reaffirm prerequisites, identify which topics are taught and reinforced, and identify gaps and redundancies at the program, course, and session levels. In the next stage, student assessment and performance will be mapped to both the objectives and competencies.

The Ilios Curriculum Management System is an essential component of this knowledge management initiative. As critical functions, Ilios allows users to search and display all activities for any course in the selected academic year and school. Ilios can robustly track and manage educational competency domains, as well as specific course- and session-level learning objectives. Documentation of changes and enhancements, increased communication and transparency, and opportunities for faculty development are additional benefits of curriculum mapping.

AUC is using Ilios as a key technologic educational solution for curriculum mapping to address the needs of external accreditors, faculty and students. Over the course of one year, Ilios has allowed AUC leaders to clearly articulate the existing curriculum which then allows for longer-term tracking of future changes and enhancements. AUC’s curriculum map now serves as a centralized location where faculty and students who are geographically distributed on an island campus and clinical sites across two continents can search and identify where and when specific topics are taught as well as easily locate teaching materials and learning resources.

Iterative e-curriculum mapping directly supports students in achieving successful mastery of complex educational topics covered throughout their four-year medical education.

Keywords:

Innovation, technology, curriculum mapping, medical education, curriculum design.