Start date: 1 July 2008
End date: 30 June 2009
Funding programme: Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants
Project website:
http://www.medicine.manchester.ac.uk/crampon
JISC theme(s): e-Learning
Committees: JISC Learning and Teaching committee
This project sets out to create a knowledgebase application to manage and maintain the complex interrelationships between curriculum content, cases for enquiry based learning and their intended learning outcomes. The application will be generic for any structured curriculum but will be tested on the Manchester MBChB curriculum, using Indexed Clinical Situations, module intended learning outcomes, Formative and Summative Assessment and PBL cases.
Overview
This project addresses the complexity of the interrelationships between the component parts of undergraduate enquiry based learning in medicine and other structured curricula such as Dentistry and Engineering. The principal users of the system will be academic curriculum development teams, students who will use appropriate search facilities to plan their learning and administrators who will use the tool to assist in resource planning and change management. There are known difficulties in the transition from traditional instruction to a PBL approach and curriculum design must address issues of preparing a syllabus, finding appropriate problems/ cases to address content, introducing students to group process and learning skills, etc. There are currently no tools available that support the design, development and maintenance of such curricula in a coherent manner, nor in any kind of teamwork environment.
Aims & Objectives
Aim: To create tool support for systematic design, review and maintenance of curricula.
Objectives
- A knowledgebase for curriculum content with its relationships to assessment and enquiry based learning;
- Lifecycle maintenance of curriculum content;
- Manipulation of knowledge elements to assess impact of change;
- Facilitation of consultation with all stakeholders;
- Facilitation of reporting and demonstration of quality and compliance to QA and standards bodies;
- A tool to plan training requirements for staff development.
Project methodology
The Project will use the UIDM approach to achieve its objectives, using the tools and methods advocated in the UIDM templates and guidelines.
During Stages 1 & 2 of the UIDM, Interviews and workshops will be carried out with the three main domain experts representing Curriculum Development and Assessment together with validation by external partners Keele University and Peninsula Medical School (PMS). From this a more complete Curriculum Domain Model will emerge. In Stages 3 & 4, the development and evaluation of successive iterations of the knowledgebase will take place. Once a relatively stable version of the knowledgebase is constructed the tool will be evaluated using three test cases within the University. then be validated and evaluated for its generalisability through a series of planned workshops in Keele and PMS.
Anticipated outputs and outcomes
The main project output will be a intuitive and generalisable curriculum knowledgebase which can be adopted and adapted to any PBL-based curriculum. The curriculum knowledgebase will be able to support mapping of external criteria onto the curriculum to ensure the programme is meeting performance quality criteria, link assessments to the curriculum as a form of blueprinting to ensure that the curriculum is examined appropriately and systematically and allow curriculum content design and revision to be more systematic, rigorous and transparent.
Technology / Standards used
The main standards to be used in development will be XHTML, CSS & OWL