Curriculum Clarity & Reform in VidaNovaVLE™

As we gear up to introduce our proprietary Taxonomy Management module next week, we wanted to start the conversation. This module is an excellent example of how our expertise and customer-first approach work together to achieve the extraordinary. We are passionate about supporting professional programs to demonstrate how they teach and assess their curriculum, for themselves, their leadership, and their accrediting bodies, and how they respond to emerging trends in the ever-changing landscape of professional education.

Through our transformative Taxonomy Management module, VidaNovaVLE™ supports creating, mapping, and reforming multiple complex curricular structures. In our virtual learning environment, your taxonomies can have one or more levels mapped to one another hierarchically. You can map ‘parent’ nodes to numerous ‘child’ nodes, and ‘child’ nodes can have multiple parents. Mapping nodes from multiple taxonomy groups to one another as equivalent creates reportable equivalencies, allowing you to tag single nodes while reporting on multiple equivalent nodes simultaneously. The abilities mentioned above allow for the market’s most flexible and robust Taxonomy Management module. These nodes can then be mapped to courses, teaching sessions, activities, and assessments to demonstrate to stakeholders how each node (and, therefore, its parents and equivalent nodes) is taught and assessed throughout the learners’ experience.

We know that professional programs want to demonstrate that their curriculum spirals; that they revisit aspects of their taxonomies with increasing complexity over time. Thus, our Taxonomy Management module allows for the layering of taxonomies. For example, a teaching session that introduces the learner to ‘taking a history’ would be mapped to that node, and that node could also be mapped to a Bloom’s-like taxonomy node of ‘knowledge’. The next time that content is delivered, the node could be mapped to ‘comprehension’ to show progression toward application and competency.

Our team has implemented a variety of uniquely complex taxonomy structures in the past. We have done so while embedded in UGME and PGME programs, and we have also done so alongside past customers on the last product we brought to market. Some examples of this include; transitioning to Competency-based Medical Education for both UME and GME programs and implementing the AOA/AACOM Core Competencies, CanMEDS Framework, Physician Competency Reference Set, and Competency-based Veterinary Education – to name a few. We understand these frameworks and that institutions often choose to map these taxonomies in conjunction with their own Institutional, Program, and Course outcomes; contextual taxonomies such as patient presentations, age ranges, settings, species, etc. along with exam frameworks such as the USMLE, NBOME, MCCQE, etc. We are leveraging our experience and familiarity with the above examples to ensure that our Taxonomy Management module can meet and exceed the expectations of various professional and health sciences programs.

The analysis of a fully mapped curriculum permits a program to understand the following about a taxonomy, right down to its most granular level:

• The amount of time spent teaching and assessing each aspect of a taxonomy
• The types of learning experiences that address each element of a taxonomy
• Gaps or redundancies across the curriculum, and how could they be addressed to ensure balance
• Learner performance across a taxonomy
• Areas of opportunity to adjust how content mapped to an aspect of the taxonomy is taught or assessed 

We all know that education evolves, as do the areas of focus that professional programs must teach. What do you do when a new ‘node’ (outcome, objective, presentation, etc.) needs to be added to a taxonomy to reflect an emerging topic or when one or more nodes are combined or retired? How do you record and analyze these changes? Within VidaNovaVLE™, programs can adjust their curricular structure while preserving the structure used in the past or associated with a particular cohort of learners. The changes can be applied in bulk across the curriculum elements directly within the virtual learning environment to reduce the administrative burden associated with such an undertaking!

Being able to…

1. Implement a complex curricular framework of taxonomies within a virtual environment
2. Visualize when and how the various nodes of those taxonomies are taught and assessed and learner performance on assessments related to them
3. Analyze the full breadth and depth of the implementation of that framework for one or more cohorts, and compare them over time
4. Address gaps, redundancies, and emerging topics and trends
5. Report on all of the above

 …is a dream come true for health sciences and professional programs that require the level of granularity that we aim to provide.

Stay tuned and sign up for updates as we build toward officially launching VidaNovaVLE™ in January!