Topic Mapping the Leeds School of Medicine Curriculum
Executive Summary
The IT department at the University Of Leeds School Of Medicine is looking into web
based technologies to model and map out the schools MBChB curriculum for pedagogic,
administrative and quality assurance purposes. A previous skills profiling project
revealed the complexity of the task at hand and the Topic Mapping specification may
provide the scope flexibility needed.
Introduction
The University Of Leeds School Of Medicine is currently reviewing its information
strategy with regard to providing timely and accurate information provision for staff and
students. In order to facilitate this there is a need for efficient and reliable tools to track,
audit and maintain information for quality assurance, learning and teaching and
administrative purposes. One tool would be a curriculum map that would help evidence
the Schools commitment to meeting the GMCs Tomorrows Doctors recommendations1.
The map would also act as a high level view over the curriculum giving staff and students
a transparent and concrete overview of the course outcomes detailing where, when and
how they fulfill these recommendations.
What is a Curriculum Map and Why Does Leeds Need One?
R.M Harden (2001)2, an expert in the area of curriculum mapping defines the curriculum
map as a ‘sophisticated blend of education strategies, course content, learning outcomes,
educational experiences, assessment, the educational environment and the students’
individual learning style, personal timetable and programme of work’. Harden argues
that it ‘can help staff and students by displaying these key elements of the curriculum and
the relationship between them’.
At Leeds progress files have recently been introduced into the curriculum and are
delivered via the VLE to Years 1 to 3. Students are required to evidence their
achievement against the GMC recommendations listed as categories with the Tomorrows
Doctors section of the progress file. However, the definition of the recommendations are
broadly defined and there is a need to link the definitions with more granular course
outcomes and competencies in order to pinpoint when, where and how these
recommendations are taught, practiced and assessed by the course.
1
2
http://www.gmc-uk.org/education/undergraduate/tomorrows_doctors.asp
Harden R.M. Medical Teacher, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001, AMEE Guide No. 21: Curriculum Mapping
Another key driver for implementing a curriculum map would be to assist course
managers and administrators with information auditing, content management and
timetabling. During and after the development of the map staff may gain an overall view
onto the course, which may help identify best practice, under assessment/ over
assessment and areas of the course that may require further development.
Curriculum mapping projects have been successfully implemented, or are currently
underway within many UK medical schools. The OPAL project (Outcomes for personal
and adaptive learning), based at the University of Edinburgh aims to ‘map learning
objectives throughout the undergraduate medical and veterinary medical curricula using
their respective Virtual Learning Environments’ (see:
http://www.lore.ed.ac.uk/community/ELP/opal/). The IVIMEDS partnership
(http://www.ivimeds.org/) has a sophisticated online curriculum map based structured
using VDEX meta-data. Hull and York Medical School have delivered their curriculum
map using an ASP.NET web application, whereas the University of Sheffield Medical
School have integrated Googles search API with their VLE to link their course outcomes
to lecture outlines, indicating when and where the outcomes are being met.
Technical Barriers to Curriculum Mapping
The diversity of curricula information is perhaps one of the major hurdles when mapping
course competencies to high level outcomes. The report author gained first hand
experience of this problem as a project team member on the JISC SPWS project (Skills
Profiling Web Service) [http://www.elframework.org/projects/spws]. One of the work
packages of the project was to create a framework of medical competencies from the
three partner medical schools (Oxford, Liverpool and Leeds) using IMS RDCEO metadata. After several consultations with clinical academic staff, and after reviewing
assessment material from various course units it became clear that it was difficult (if not
impossible) to describe clinical competencies using a uniform level of detail both within
one curriculum and across the three courses.
Within Tomorrow’s Doctors, outcomes and competencies are described at varying
degrees of detail. For example section 19a) ‘Take and record a patient's history,
including their family history’ is a high level definition which could possibly be broken
down into a range of competencies covered by different course units. Other outcomes
however carry narrower definitions and are more explicitly defined as ‘j. Give
intramuscular and subcutaneous injections.’, or ‘l. Perform suturing.’ Many
competencies are also dealt with by more than one area of the curriculum and are often
repeated by more than one paragraph in Tomorrow’s Doctors.
Semantics is another difficult issue when describing competencies as a skill taught within
by one individual may be labeled differently by another individual or course unit
depending on the context.
With these lessons in mind it is important that a curriculum management system has the
scope and flexibility to accommodate an amorphous information structure, comprised of
outcomes and competencies, which in themselves maybe referred to in several different
ways depending on the context, or the individual accessing the system.
Topic Mapping to Describe Curricula
Following research into available content/information management systems and tools the
Topic Mapping3 specification stands out for the following reasons:
1. The abstract nature of its specification means that it can be used to represent any
information domain which gives it virtually unlimited flexibility. A topic
mapping application can describe its own schema (or ontology), which suggests
that applications incorporating a topic map engine can be extended easily.
2. Topic Mapping appears to be derived from concept mapping, which in turn has
been used by US institutions as a tool for curriculum mapping.4
3. It is an international standard (ISO 13250) which implies that the specification
will be around for some time.
4. There is a small community of software companies and developers offering
software solutions that can render and populate topic map based content
management systems.
As it is XML based it has the following advantages over database driven web
applications.
5. Elements can contain URIs to external resources and information on the web or
an intranet.
6. It provides searchable framework.
7. It can be rendered for electronic and printed documentation and course material.
8. It can be transformed via XSLT to other meta-data formats such as RDCEO and
XCRI.
For an explanation on Topic Mapping read “The TAO of Topic Mapping”, Steve Pepper,
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html
4 Allen, B. S., Hoffman, R. P., Kompella, J., & Sticht, T. G. (1993). Computer-based mapping for
curriculum development. In: Proceedings of selected Research and Development Presentations
Technology sponsored by the Research and Theory Division. New Orleans, LA. (Eric Document
Reproduction Services No. ED 362 145) &
McDaniel, Roth, Miller, Concept Mapping as a Tool for Curriculum Design, National Defense
University, Washington DC, USA
3
What is Topic Mapping?
Mapping describes information using three criteria; Topics, Associations and
Occurrences. An explanation of these criteria follows.
Topics
A topic can be any abstract concept or idea. Each topic is labeled with a unique identifier,
has a title and a description and can be assigned to types (also classed as topics in
themselves).
Example
For a curriculum map we might use topics labeled: “Portfolio”, “Taking a
History” and “Medicine”. The topic “Portfolio” can be assigned the type
“Assessment”, “Taking a History” can be of type “Competency” and “Medicine”
would be of type “Subject”.
Something worth noting is when topics of a different name allude to be the same entity
they can be tagged with a subject identity, such as a URI, in order to assert that they refer
to the same thing (i.e. example, the topics “Module” and “Course Unit”).
Associations
Associations define the relationships between the topics. In the context of curriculum
mapping examples of associations could be:
 An OCSE assessment measures a Resuscitation competency.
 A History taking competency is measured by a simulated patient interview.
 A “Communicates Effectively” course outcome contains in part the competency
“History Taking”
 Ethics is a sub-course unit that is part of Personal and Professional
Development
Occurrences
An occurrence of a topic is a reference, or pointer to a resource describing the topic (or an
aspect of the topic) in further detail. The reference would normally be in the form of a
web link that accesses the resource online, so for example, the Topic Medicine might be
associated with these occurrences:
 GMC Web site: http://www.gmc-uk.org
 BMC Medicine: http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcmed/
Example of a Curriculum Topic Map
The following example attempts to demonstrate Topic Maps in the context of mapping
common competencies across interdisciplinary healthcare subjects (Physiotherapy and
Midwifery). The boxes represent the topic elements and the lines are the associations
defined by the organisation. The structure and semantics are defined within the topic
map file (.XTM) and not prescribed by the schema.
The Next Stage
The Schools IT Project Officer intends to create a proof of concept curriculum map
trialing various software solutions such as Ontopias Topic Map5 engine or using CMap
tools6.
5
6
http://www.ontopia.net/solutions/index.html
http://cmap.ihmc.us/
Conclusion
There is no doubt that an online curriculum map of the Leeds MBChB would be of
benefit both to staff and students as a means of adding clarity and transparency to course
information. The abstract definition of the medical curriculum poses many technical
challenges and may require an abstract meta-data solution such as Topic Mapping in
order to define the key curricula concepts and make explicit associations between them.