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A Research-based Change Approach in the Further Implementation of Research into Undergraduate Education

Jointly discussing care plans for real-life patients

Background Interprofessional education is promoted as a means of enhancing future collaborative practice in healthcare. We developed a learning activity in which undergraduate medical, nursing and allied healthcare students practice interprofessional collaboration during a student-led interprofessional team meeting. Design and delivery During their clinical rotation at a family physician’s practice, each medical student visits a frail elderly patient and prepares a care plan for the patient. At a student-led interprofessional team meeting, medical, nursing and allied healthcare students jointly review these care plans. Subsequently, participating students reflect on their interprofessional collaboration during the team meeting, both collectively and individually. Every 4 weeks, six interprofessional team meetings take place. Each team comprises 9–10 students from various healthcare professions, and meets once. To date an average of 360 medical and 360 nursing and allied healthcare students have participated in this course annually. Evaluation Students mostly reported positive experiences, including the opportunity to learn with, from and about other healthcare professions in the course of jointly reviewing care plans, and feeling collectively responsible for the care of the patients involved. Additionally, students reported a better understanding of the contextual factors at hand. The variety of patient cases, diversity of participating health professions, and the course material need improvement. Conclusion Students from participating institutions confirmed that attending a student-led interprofessional team meeting had enabled them to learn with, from and about other health professions in an active role. The use of real-life cases and the educational design contributed to the positive outcome of this interprofessional learning activity.

The Integration of Research in the Higher Education Curriculum: A Systematic Review

The support for connections between research and education is widespread. This connection yields the promise of educating students for the knowledge society. With the curriculum as the most important carrier of planned higher education, the lack of systematic insight in how research can be integrated into the curriculum is an important omission. This systematic review considers how empirical studies provide input for the integration of research in the higher education curriculum. Moreover, it provides a structured insight into the current body of knowledge on research in the curriculum. Based on a first set of 5815 journal articles, 121 articles were selected for further analysis. The model of Curriculum Aspects by Van den Akker (2003) was used to categorise the articles, which shows a body of knowledge on research in the curriculum with the largest focus on learning aims and learning activities. Furthermore, this review shows how few studies consider the effects of curriculum design on student learning, which calls for more empirical studies to benefit student learning.

Responsive curriculum development for professional education

Due to fast and unpredictable developments, professional education is challenged with being responsive, which demands a rethinking of conventional curriculum development approaches. Yet, literature on curriculum development falls short in terms of recognising how to react rapidly and adequately to these new developments. This study focuses on curriculum development initiatives at the school level in a Dutch university of applied sciences. Open interviews were held with 29 curriculum developers to explore how they define and give substance to developing curricula for new, changing or unpredictable professions. These 29 participants were involved in seven curriculum development trajectories. Four themes were detected: (1) curriculum developers are in favour of open, flexible and authentic curricula; (2) the context in which the curriculum development takes place and the different roles and responsibilities of curriculum developers are challenging; (3) curriculum developers feel insufficiently equipped to carry out their tasks; and (4) involving stakeholders is necessary but results in a “viscous” social–political process. Responsive curriculum development requires a great deal of flexibility and adaptability from curriculum developers. Yet, in our study, “institutional concrete” is found to severely hinder responsive curriculum development processes. To be responsive, such processes need to be supported and institutional barriers need to be removed.

Designing an integrated, futureproof, and flexible curriculum

Industrial Design Engineering [Open] Innovation (IDE) is a 3-year, English taught, VWO entry-level, undergraduate programme at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS). The IDE curriculum focuses on the fuzzy front end of (open) innovation, sustainable development, and impact in the implementation phase of product-service design. The work field of Industrial Design Engineering and Open Innovation, like many other domains, is growing increasingly more complex (Bogers, Zobel, Afuah, Almirall, Brunswicker, Dahlander, Frederiksen, Gawer, & Gruber, 2017). Not only have the roles of designers changed considerably in the last decades, they continue to do so at increasing speed. Therefore, industrial design engineering students need different and perhaps more competencies as young professionals in order to deal with this new complexity. Moreover, in our transitional society, lifelong learning takes a central position (Reekers, 2017). Students need to give their learning path direction autonomously, in accordance with their talents and interests. IDE’s Quality & Curriculum Committee (QCC) realized in 2015 there is too much new knowledge to address in a 3-year programme. Instead, IDE students need to learn how to become temporary experts in an array of topics, depending on the characteristics of each new project they do (see Textbox 1). The QCC also concluded that more than just incremental changes to the current curriculum were needed; thus, the idea for a flexible, choice-based semester approach in the curriculum was born: ‘Curriculum M’ (Modular). A co-creational approach was applied, in which teaching staff, students, alumni, prospective students, industry (including the (international) social profit sector), and educational advisors collaborated to develop a curriculum that would allow students to become not just T-shaped (wide basis, one expertise) professionals, but U- or W-shaped professionals, with strong links to other disciplines.

Educators’ experiences with governance in curriculum change processes

In the midst of continuous health professions curriculum reforms, critical questions arise about the extent to which conceptual ideas are actually put into practice. Curricula are often not implemented as intended. An under-explored aspect that might play a role is governance. In light of major curriculum changes, we explored educators' perspectives of the role of governance in the process of translating curriculum goals and concepts into institutionalized curriculum change at micro-level (teacher-student). In three Dutch medical schools, 19 educators with a dual role (teacher and coordinator) were interviewed between March and May 2018, using the rich pictures method. We employed qualitative content analysis with inductive coding. Data collection occurred concurrently with data analysis. Different governance processes were mentioned, each with its own effects on the curriculum and organizational responses. In Institute 1, participants described an unclear governance structure, resulting in implementation chaos in which an abstract educational concept could not be fully realized. In Institute 2, participants described a top-down and strict governance structure contributing to relatively successful implementation of the educational concept. However it also led to demotivation of educators, who started rebelling to recover their perceived loss of freedom. In Institute 3, participants described a relatively fragmentized process granting a lot of freedom, which contributed to contentment and motivation but did not fully produce the intended changes. Our paper empirically illustrates the importance of governance in curriculum change. To advance curriculum change processes and improve their desired outcomes it seems important to define and explicate both hard and soft governance processes.