While the concept of curriculum mapping has been with us for a number of years, it is only recently that technology has enabled the creation of detailed, dynamic, useful curriculum maps. However, a common question that arises is, “to what should we map our curriculum?”
Terminal objectives are too broad, learning objectives too specific. To solve this problem, we created TIME (Topics for Indexing Medical Education). TIME is a hierarchical taxonomy of topics relevant to medical education. It is a general-purpose, intermediate-granularity, standardized index that covers the entire range of subject matter in medical education.
The content and structure of Topics within TIME was developed in consultation with medical educators and librarians at multiple Canadian medical schools. As far as possible, the language used is standardized to the Unified Medical Language System.
We have built TIME as a web application that allows users from various schools to enter their school-specific Competencies and Learning Objectives, and then link these to the standardized Topics in a way that is meaningful to the school. The entire TIME content and structure can then be exported, via XML, to external applications and used as an index for curriculum mapping, metatagging learning objects, or categorizing examination questions.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own wireless internet-ready laptops.
