Sadly, granular tracking and reporting on curriculum and learner performance via a combination of spreadsheets and other tools is still a necessity for many health sciences and higher education institutions. This approach results in excessive administrative burden across all levels of administration along with formidable curricular analysis and reporting; difficulty in identifying gaps and redundancies, making the demonstration of a spiraling curriculum or curricular evolution, reform, or improvement almost impossible without multiple tools; and ultimately, introducing an increased risk for human error. There are products out there that focus solely on curriculum tracking. Still, they lack the many learning management system (LMS) features institutions need, resulting in frustrated learners, instructors, and administrators. In contrast, LMSs that focus on content delivery lack the expertise and flexibility to adequately track curriculum to the level of detail required to support accreditation, curricular reform, and evolution, leaving intuitions scrambling to track and visualize this data in any way they can.
With VidaNovaVLE™, you can do both: track curriculum to a level of granularity that has never been possible before while also taking advantage of LMS features that are robust and top-of-the-line! For example, we understand that tagging curriculum to a specific session or event is helpful, but what about the resources attached to that session (e.g., lecture notes, links to supporting articles, etc.)? Say we have 4 or 5 curricular topics covered in a session with 6 or 7 resources attached, and one of those resources is very specific to one of the curricular topics. Without being able to tag the resources, learners won’t know which of those resources supports the tag(s) covered by that session.
We know that tagging curricular content isn’t always specific to an institution’s outcomes or objectives, which is why our Taxonomy module is named precisely that! It’s because we understand that things like level of mastery, competency level, clinical presentations, body systems, patient ages, settings, etc., also need to be tracked and are often a part of an institution’s overall curricular structure or framework. Within VidaNovaVLE™, you will even be able to tag an aspect of your curriculum and then tag that tag with a tag from another taxonomy group if you want to! For example, let’s say you want a session to focus on a specific session learning outcome (SLO). As an aside, the SLO has been mapped to the corresponding Course Learning Outcome (CLO), which has been mapped to its related Program Learning Outcome (PLO), which has been mapped to its corresponding Institutional Learning Outcome (ILO) – but we digress! Still, you’re teaching first-year learners and want to indicate that the level of mastery is novice. In that example, you would tag your session with the desired SLO, then tag that SLO with the novice tag from your levels of mastery taxonomy group. Now, you, your leadership, learners, and the administration know that that session has covered that outcome at the novice level – and by virtue of its relationships, the related CLO, PLO, and ILO have also been covered at the novice level by this particular session!
The ability to tag, track, and visualize the teaching and assessment of a variety of interconnected and standalone taxonomies across VidaNovaVLE™ will be unmatched due to our passion for excellence and our drive to ensure that in addition to courses, sessions, resources, activities, and assessments, you will be able to tag anything and everything that should be reportable when it comes to tracking and reporting on your taxonomies.