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At the recent AACOM Annual Conference in Washington DC, we met many medical school administrators who were facing challenges with mapping their school’s curricula.
A successfully executed curriculum mapping project holds great rewards, producing valuable data for students, faculty, and administrators. The task of creating a comprehensive curriculum map, however, can be daunting. Schools often struggle to figure out where to start.
We’ve seen our share of ambitious curriculum mapping projects that turned out to require much more time and effort than initially estimated. Projects that failed often did so because the final result was just not useful enough. To avoid these potential pitfalls when mapping your curriculum, keep the following tips in mind:
1. Make your curriculum map useful for students
Think of your curriculum map as more than just as administrative overhead. In our experience, schools that make their curriculum map useful for students enjoy a map that is more comprehensive, updated more frequently, and used more by faculty and administration. This occurs because of the natural adjustments that faculty and administration make to match their processes up with student behavior.
2. Use data on report usage to drive updates
Users perform curriculum searches far more often than they navigate the curriculum.Try to keep tabs on the types of searches users perform. You can also ask users what other data they’d like to find while they are performing a search. Use the qualitative and quantitative data you collect to justify changes to your curriculum map.
3. Add detail in small increments
If you are considering changes to your curriculum map, focus first on testing that the changes will produce value for your users at a small scale before rolling them out full-scale. This means mapping one course instead of 10, or having a few students generate reports while you watch them work, or creating a test installation of your curriculum map where you can play around without worrying about making mistakes. The goal of these small scale experiments is to get the users excited about the results. Whenever a suggestion is made to change the curriculum, try and ask “how can we test that this will add value?”
By proceeding carefully and matching your curriculum mapping efforts with the most valuable use cases for those efforts, your curriculum mapping project is sure to see greater success and buy-in from students, faculty, and administrators.
To learn how to apply these tips to your school’s curriculum mapping project, read our Best Practices Guide or see a demo of how one45 can help manage your curriculum.
