Building Curriculum Infrastructure in Medical Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Building Curriculum Infrastructure in Medical Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The Building Curriculum Infrastructure in Medical Education (BCIME) project dealt with the challenges of curriculum management and its optimisation in terms of curriculum mapping and outcome based education focused on learners. The activities of project partners aimed specifically on curricula of medical and health care disciplines, however, the methodology and results of the project are generally applicable to other fields of study.

BCIME developed the innovative, intuitive, well structured and easily applicable standard-compliant curriculum management system EDUportfolio. The EDUportfolio platform has been setup and implemented for all partner institutions in the light of both the results of BCIME needs analysis and the review of the latest literature in the field, so that it is applicable by the widest possible community and stakeholders, including curriculum developers, teachers, students, university and faculty management, administrators and technical staff as well. Moreover, BCIME provided and used a coherent and comprehensive framework with all necessary instruments for a well-structured curriculum management. Doing so, the BCIME project has met all its objectives and now shares (i) the know-how in the field of curriculum management, innovating on and optimising the proven methodology of parametric description and a step-by-step manual for curriculum development; (ii) the descriptions of selected parts of the curricula represented by the Anatomy in English as taught at all involved partner institutions and by the Neurosurgery in Romanian, the Conservative and Prosthetic Dentistry in Slovak, the Clinical and communication skills in German, the Communication skills in Polish and the Analysis, Data Management and Informatics for Healthcare Specialisation in Czech; (iii) a set of curriculum mapping research and exploratory questions with the analysis answered by the project in an visualisation toolkit capable of exploring hidden relations in described curricula.

During the BCIME project implementation, all its outcomes and outputs were continuously distributed and publicly shared to all persons interested in curriculum optimisation and standardisation via the project’s website, dissemination activities as well as multiplier events. In order to identify both the conceptual as well as functional features of the complex curriculum management platform and to meet expectations and requirements of participating institutions, we conducted surveys and personal discussions among 63 participants representing faculty managers, guarantors of study programs, curriculum designers, teachers, researchers, technicians and administrative staff involved in curriculum management. As the results of this needs analysis, the curriculum system’s key characteristics and features were derived and integrated into the methodologies and platform that was tested and implemented across partners’ institutions within our intellectual outputs. The same types of participants, extended by medical students, were invited to multiplier events we were able to conduct during the implementation period which was significantly affected by the worldwide pandemic situation. During three multiplier events, we shared our achieved outputs to 143 stakeholders. The exploratory and confirmatory research questions in the field of curriculum mapping were communicated to 27 stakeholders of each partner institution interested in the process of curriculum management. Based on the nominal group technique, we achieved formal consensus that generated the prioritised set of 56 right research questions. Answers to the individual research questions, together with the methodologies, step-by-step manual and outcome-based metadata description of selected parts of curriculum can be browsed by particular target groups using EDUportfolio (https://eduportfolio.iba.muni.cz/) and analytical and visualisation tools the BCIME project delivered.

The BCIME project addressed the fundamental need of curriculum management and standardisation for which the systematic solution based on proven pedagogical approaches and methodologies was developed. Our set of intellectual outputs resulted in the system capable of managing and analysing curricula and is ready to be used by more than 12 500 students in the theoretical and clinical phases of medical and healthcare study programmes, more than 60 faculty members involved in the curriculum management and the 5 BCIME partner institutions (UPJS, JU, UMF, UAU, MU). Due to our project consortium cooperation the outcomes of the project are available to stakeholders at all the faculties of medicine and health care sciences involved in the MEFANET network, to other professional medical societies and general public. In order to reach a wider scientific community, the consortium was involved in dissemination of the project activities at international conferences and journal articles.

Project Website

http://bcime.upjs.sk

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 226113 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERZITA PAVLA JOZEFA SAFARIKA V KOSICIACH & Country: SK

Project Partners

• UNIWERSYTET JAGIELLONSKI
• UNIVERSITAET AUGSBURG
• Masarykova univerzita
• UNIVERSITATEA DE MEDICINA SI FARMACIE GRIGORE T POPA DIN IASI