At November’s AAMC Annual General Meeting in San Francisco, one of the hottest topics was the AAMC’s new Curriculum Inventory and Reports project which will be replacing CurrMIT in Summer of 2013. The new tool is quite a departure from CurrMIT: it doesn’t support data entry like CurrMIT did, it focuses a lot more on standardization, and it supports far more curriculum variations than CurrMIT’s course, session, section model. It achieves this by requiring that all member schools submit their data in the new MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory XML format. A description of the XML format can be found in the Curriculum Inventory Implementation Guidelines document.
What do these changes mean for you and your school? Here are a set of steps you will need to take in order to get ready to upload to the Curriculum Inventory (CI):
Decide if you’re going to participate
Participating in the Curriculum Inventory process is optional. Medical schools that submit their data to the CI will be able to compare their school’s curriculum with those of other schools across the country and against other schools in different comparison groups (such as schools in the same region or schools of similar size). Schools that don’t submit their data won’t have this same level of access, but they will have some basic reports available to them. The reporting will be anonymous so that individual schools aren’t identifiable.
Standardize your Instructional and Assessment Methods and Resources
One of the major goals of the Curriculum Inventory project is to allow comparison across different schools’ curricula. If you’ve ever used CurrMIT (or have ever seen another school’s curriculum, then you know that this poses a real challenge! In CurrMIT right now there are more than 20 variations of the Instructional Method “Lecture” because of the flexibility that CurrMIT gave schools to define their own terms.
The new Curriculum Inventory will prevent the spread of duplicate items and enable cross-curriculum comparison by requiring schools to standardize certain portions of their curriculum before submitting them to the CI. One key area where standardization will need to happen for most schools is with Instructional and Assessment Methods and Resources.
The AAMC in collaboration with MedBiquitous has created three standardized lists for Instructional and Assessment Methods and Resources. The lists are available here: https://www.mededportal.org/icollaborative/resource/498. These lists are peer reviewed and attempt to capture every single type of Instructional Method, Resource, or Assessment Method.
So, exactly how will standardization work? Well, let’s say you have a few different didactic, single-presenter/many-learner sessions in your curriculum. You may have a few different names for these such as “Lecture”, “Didactic Session”, and “Presentation”. What you’ll need to do before you send this data to the AAMC Curriculum Inventory is match each of these Instructional Methods to the standardized list of Instructional Methods. In this case, Lecture, Didactic Session, and Presentation would all be of the “Lecture” type since they are all single-presenter/many-learner.
Standardize your competencies
The next step of the standardization process is a bit trickier: you need to standardize the competencies you’ll be using. Some schools are using custom competency lists, some are using edited versions of standard competency lists (for example, modified ACGME competencies), and others are using standard competency lists straight out of the box.
If you are using a modified or custom list, you will need to map your competencies to a standard list, just like in the previous step. For example, if you have a customized list of Outcomes, you will need to pick which of the ACGME Competencies, the Scottish Doctor Outcomes, or the CanMEDS roles list is most similar to your competencies and cross-link the elements in the official list with your competencies. That way, the Curriculum Inventory will be able to compare your school’s competencies with that of other schools.
Decide on how to generate an XML version of your curriculum
Once you’ve decided if you’ll be submitting data to the Curriculum Inventory, and once you’ve got everything mapped and standardized, you’ll need to decide how you’ll get the data into the CI. Here are some options:
- Purchase one of the vendor systems that have committed to supporting the CI tool and use it to upload the data. Obviously, we’d like you to go with one45, but you can find the whole list of available vendor options here: https://www.aamc.org/initiatives/cir/
- Build an XML generator yourself. Some schools have proprietary systems and others have various pieces of curriculum data spread across multiple systems. If you see a lot of value in getting your data up to the CI, you may want to consider building a tool that will support uploads to the CI. Alternatively, the next option may make the most sense for you if you’re not yet sure of the value of the CI for your school.
- Manually-generate the XML once per year. For this first year, you may want to consider manually-generating the XML. There are some tools out there that can help validate the XML you produce, like the W3C XML Validator (https://validator.w3.org). If you have someone who’s willing to read the MedBiquitous specifications, and can manipulate Excel and text files pretty well, this may be an option that won’t take up too much of your time or resources.
At one45 we have a bunch of experience with this kind of thing, so drop us a line if you have questions and are thinking about pursuing this option!
And that’s it! There’s a lot of information here, and certainly preparing for the CI is not a trivial deal. In future blog posts, we’ll be diving deeper into some of the topics covered in this post as well as other Curriculum Management issues.