Use of a terminology server to support a concept-based approach for medical curriculum development

Abstract

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a prototype application to support concept-based curriculum development. The application was implemented as a client of a terminology server. This application was developed as part of the CoMET project (Conceptual Modeling Environments for Teachers). The terminology server (TeS) used in this study was developed in the European Union project GALEN and although it has supported clinical applications, this was its first use as a source of conceptual knowledge to support curriculum development. The application was designed to allow the user to search, locate and bookmark concepts. It could also report on the relationships between two individual sets of concepts. The application was used in a preliminary study of concept based course development. In this empirical study, 16 subjects worked in pairs to produce and compare a list of concepts from two related areas of medical curriculum. Most subjects concluded that the application was relatively easy to use and gave useful information. They also made several suggestions about improvements to the tools and the value of the concept based approach for team based curriculum development. The requirements for the next generation of tools are discussed.