CTC was useful as a multipurpose tool providing planners with meaningful feedback to (1) assess congruence of intended changes in physician behavior with program objectives, (2) document unanticipated learning outcomes, and (3) enable and reinforce intended behavior change.
TIME (Topics for Indexing Medical Education) is a general-purpose, intermediate-granularity taxonomy of topics that describe the content of undergraduate medical education. Within outcome-based education systems, curriculum planning focuses on the desired product rather than process, and the contributions of curricular elements to achievement of the outcomes must be made visible. In this paper, we discuss how TIME may be used as a content index in curriculum maps to link curricular elements to multiple outcome frameworks. This assists with curriculum development and evaluation, quality assurance, curriculum searching, detection of gaps and redundancies, and sharing of educational objects. TIME is available at http://www.time-item.org (username "guest"; password "guest").
PDA-based patient-encounter logs appear to be effective case documentation and reflection tools. The difference in number of logs between control and intervention groups demonstrates the utility of the PDA for "point-of-care" patient logging.
Use statistics indicate that over 90% of students regularly use the MEDICOL sites and have found them helpful. University of British Columbia medical school enrollment will increase because of collaborations with campuses and medical centers across the province. MEDICOL will likely play an increased role in distance learning by continuing to deliver the resources already described, as well as facilitating synchronous communications (e.g., PBL chat rooms) and teaching (e.g., video-streamed lectures) to students located across the province.
TIME is available as a web application that allows users from various schools to enter their school-specific outcomes, competencies and learning objectives, and then link these to the standardised 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, meta-tagging learning objects, or categorising examination questions. TIME can be viewed at http://www.time-item.org (username: 'guest'; password: 'guest').
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