Tom Broens (Amsterdam UMC): act-E: Unravel your curriculum

Tom Broens (Amsterdam UMC): act-E: Unravel your curriculum

We develop act-E, a unique online curriculum information system. It helps students, teachers and managers to unravel their education. Courses are no longer ‘islands’  but part of a bigger picture: the curriculum. A high-quality curriculum is designed to have a consistent allignment and build-up of learning goals, assessment and activities. Designing and maintaining such a curriculum is not ease without suitable tooling. Act-E provides a single source of structured curriculum information that is available to all involved stakeholders. Everybody can collaborate and have informed conversations on their education. It simplifies accreditations and improves the educational quality.

Why not use a spreadsheet? Simple, right? Just put some courses in a sequence. Done! However, when disecting a curriculum its complexity becomes clear. Many elements are multi-dimentional and highly interconnected. This is impossible to visualize in a spreadsheet. Also, different versions of spreadsheets makes sharing extremely difficult, the information ages quicly and becomes error prone. Without act-E, curriculum information that was collected with a lot of hard work, is quickly gathering dust ….