The MEDCIN project - describing outcome-based medical curriculausing MedBiquitous standards

Modern medical and healthcare curricula represent a highly complex mixture of different disciplines, specialties and pedagogical approaches, the nature of which can be difficult to communicate to key stakeholders at a local, national or international level. To date, there is no standardized way of describing curricula within outcome-based medical and healthcare education, making evaluation and comparison of such curricula challenging. The EC Erasmus+ funded MEDCIN (Medical Curriculum Innovations, http://www.medcin-project.eu/) project proposes an innovative methodological background to view, evaluate and compare medical curricula, and to develop user-friendly web-based tools to make this information accessible to curriculum designers and teachers alike. Based around the MedBiq uitous Curriculum Inventory standard (ANSI/MEDBIQ CI.10.1-2013), an interactive prototype has been developed to provide a flexible view and visualisations of curriculum structures which can be explored at differing levels of granularity. By integrating this tool, the project aims to standardize the use of the OPTIMED curriculum management system within the MEFANET network of medical faculties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This demonstration will showcase the MEDCIN prototype and its use of the Curriculum Inventory standard, and invite feedback from participants on how such technology can most usefully be applied in a global context. The approach of using technical standards, compliant systems and standardized vocabularies can provide greater clarity about a curriculum structure. The benefits for faculty include being able to better evaluate and measure their teaching against the required outcomes, while students can better understand their intended learning.