Zeitschrift für Hochschuldidaktik Nr. 1999/2
Medicine Study 2000
Alternatives for Learning and Assessment, Teaching and Evaluation
Charles E. ENGEL (London, UK)
Some Thoughts on Curriculum Design
Introduction
Excellence in academic education has for long been based on the expertise,experience, scholarship and research of the academic teacher. These attributes have been fostered by the development of distinctive intellectual disciplines, supported by the organisation of discipline-specific departments. A tradition has thus developed where the teaching - its content, , its delivery and its examination - is determined by these individual departments.
How appropriate is such separate and independently timetabled delivery of information for the education of doctors who will be expected to practise effectively throughout the first half of the 21st Century?These future colleagues will have to be able to adapt to a growing diversity of changes and be able to participate in the management of such changes - not only within their own profession but much more generally on behalf of society at large (ENGEL, 2000). Almost one hundred years ago Sir William OSLER (1913),with wide research, clinical and educational experience in North America and Europe, referred to the growing phenomenon of information overload, when he concluded "The truth is, we have outrun an educational system framed in simpler days and for simpler conditions. The pressure comes hard enough upon the teacher, but far harder upon the taught, who suffer in a hundred different ways. "Numerous national enquiries into the need for reform in medi- cal education have arrived at the same conclusion -the development of future professionals has to emphasise learning rather than the presentation of information (ENGEL, 1989).
How, then, can this changed educational paradigm be translated into reality? This is no longer a matter of speculation but a matter of evidence-based and experience-based medical education (e. g. HARDEN et al., 1999;SCOTT,1999; DAVIES, 2000). Medical education into the 21st Century is changing from pragmatic amateurism to more scientific and socially responsive profes- sionalism (General Medical Council, 1993;KAMIEN et. al., 1999; WOOD & BLIGH, 2000).
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