Curriculum mapping

We bring to our partnerships extensive experience in curriculum mapping. In appreciating how a whole programme ‘fits’ together and considering how curricula are recorded and communicated to those using, developing and evaluating them, our approach provides a solid foundation for the development of new medical programmes and review of existing programmes.

Imperial's interactive curriculum mapping software - Sofia

Our bespoke curriculum mapping software has been developed to assist with this process of understanding and navigating programmes; working together with faculty, planning staff and delivering direct to students, it plays an important role in curricular engagement and the monitoring of academic quality.  

In 2014 Imperial set out to make their curriculum more transparent and accessible for students and teachers alike. After searching but finding nothing that quite met the specific needs of a forward looking medical curriculum we chose to build a bespoke mapping system and partnered with Isotoma, a York-based bespoke development company, to create Sofia.

Introducing Sofia

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Sofia does not just lay out learning outcomes in a hierarchical data structure, it allows you to overlay different visualisations of curriculum metadata to identify themes and signpost both underpinning principles and clinical relevance. In addition to the familiar tree-based database, the "explore" view highlights domains and themes across all years of the curriculum on one page, whilst the clinical view categorises clinical medicine by both condition and presentation, to guide students through common differential diagnoses.

Reflecting a more spiral curriculum approach, outcomes can also be shared across modules and themes so that students can see outcomes by learning event, and also review how many learning opportunities they have to pick up each outcome. Full version control gives impressive change management oversight and the next iteration of Sofia will introduce even stronger governance functionality, making Sofia as useful from a governance perspective as it already is for front-line teaching. 

MBBS Curriculum Review

In addition to developing new medical programmes, we provide expertise in reviewing existing curricula.

We adopt a robust quality assurance review of both the MBBS programme at Imperial College London and at our joint medical school, LKCMedicine, Singapore. We conduct a full periodic review of the curriculum, working with different partner teams in London and Singapore, to ensure the programme remains cutting edge, future proofed and exceeds the expectations of students, faculty and clinicians.  

Completion of large scale curriculum reviews at both Imperial College London and LKCMedicine has allowed us to refine our curricular approaches and includes engagement with all stakeholders and quality assurance processes.