MAPPING & DISTRIBUTING COMPTENCY-BASED CURICULA: TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

John D Voss¹, John M Jackson*¹, Vladimir Goodkovsky¹, Ye Chen¹, Bonnie Jerome-D'Emilia². University of Virginia School of Medicine¹;  University of Virginia School of Nursing²; P.O. Box 800859, Charlottesville, VA 22908, U.S.A.

PURPOSE: Design a theory based curriculum design tool that meets the needs of medical and nursing educators.

METHODS: Designing a competency-based curriculum for graduate medical or nursing education is a challenge. We have defined a conceptual model that translates competency language into generalizable professional abilities for physicians and nurses. We built a module using the open source Moodle Learning Management System that educators can use to collect, organize and present resources for single or multidisiplinary groups of learners. Our application contains both a competency mapping (CMI) and a curriculum building interface (CBI). The CMI permits users to take high level competencies, divide them into logical subunits and attach specific learning objectives, activities and assessments such that individual learning activities and assessments can support teaching multiple competencies. The CBI presents educators with keyword coded and searchable collections of learning activities and assessments organized by competency. Educators can collect and download educational resources stored in Moodle to build custom curricula for use at their institutions as well as a report card that allows educators to track learner progress towards competency achievement. This open source Moodle module is suitable for use for any graduate or undergraduate health or other professional education program.

RESULTS: The Achieving Competency Today web site, based upon the tools described above, is scheduled to release in late March, 2008.

CONCLUSION/FUTURE DIRECTIONS: If additional grant funding is awarded, these tools will be expanded to automatically generate web-based courses based upon curriculum maps.