No, Really, We Actually Have an Integrated Curriculum
In 2006, the University of Minnesota established a new coordinate campus in Rochester (UMR) to focus on health sciences and biotechnology. The changing face of health sciences carries many parallels to the current evolution of higher education, including a need for increased personalization, collaboration, and data-based decision making. Like many medical organizations, today's universities are large institutions where change can be difficult and challenges arise from disparate academic departments, a focus on individual courses that can stifle curriculum development, and inefficiencies that increase costs. However, embracing these challenges and changes would produce the following benefits: a streamlined college experience with reduced costs, an opportunity to pioneer and evaluate new educational techniques, and a holistic education that would prepare students with conceptual understanding and abilities that go beyond mere competencies. In the case of health sciences there is a specific need for curricular changes to foster quantitative and analytical thinking, the ability to work in diverse teams, and an understanding not only of the complexity of living systems, but also of the complexity of human behavior and societies.
Of course such grand ideas frequently struggle to ignite in the real world. Fortunately, founding a new campus creates opportunities to try new things. Thus, several key decisions were made during the development of UMR's flagship Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences (BSHS) program:
- UMR has no departments; there is one single academic unit: the Center for Learning Innovation (CLI), a team of faculty members drawn from across disciplines to create a complete and cohesive BSHS program.
- Students in the BSHS program study a common set of lower division classes with a perspective on health sciences designed to prepare students for higher division classes to reduce program costs.
- The CLI faculty is tasked with creating a truly integrated curriculum in which student learning is linked across subject areas to create a unified health sciences curriculum rather than a selection of disparate courses.
- Lastly, as the name suggests, the Center for Learning Innovation was designed with the imperative to investigate the effectiveness of learning techniques and provide data-based evidence to drive decision making. UMR’s Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs describes this imperative in another chapter of this eBook.[1]
For many educators, an integrated curriculum is a lofty goal that is about as attainable as a unicorn's horn. Coordinating course and module design across an interdisciplinary faculty requires political will, an immense amount of planning, and the right tools. As a new small campus, UMR is able to tailor its organization to facilitate such an endeavor, and UMR has also invested resources to create a technology-rich learning environment from the enterprise to the classrooms. Beyond this, an integrated curriculum requires an immense level of planning and collaboration, often a difficult and messy process. It is here that technology presented an opportunity. In order to achieve UMR's pioneering goal of overcoming the challenges of modern higher education, it was decided that a new paradigm in curriculum management, delivery, and analysis was needed. It was necessary to create something that would support a collaborative, integrated curriculum. Existing course management systems meet their requirements effectively, but moving to an integrated curriculum would require a new and different approach: a system that would facilitate collaboration; support an integrated curriculum, delivery, and assessment; and also capture extensive data for pedagogical research. Thus was born iSEAL, the Intelligent System for Education Assessment and Learning.
This Is One Party Where Technology Brings Something
iSEAL is radically different from traditional course management systems. Because it can provide access to and integration across the entire curriculum, it might be better described as a curriculum management system. Yet that description does not capture all its capabilities. iSEAL is also designed as a comprehensive data collection tool that tracks all student activity to provide a deep data set for learning analytics. In short, iSEAL is intended to support all aspects of teaching and research related to the BSHS program.
Key features include the following:
- Curricular materials (Courses, Modules and Learning Objects) are sharable and reusable, facilitating and encouraging collaboration.
- Assignments and curricular materials can be tagged with concepts and learning objectives, assisting in curriculum development and enabling their connection for analytics and research.
- The entire repository of curricular materials is accessible to all BSHS students at all times, so they can look ahead to courses they might take in the future and also review material they have previously studied.
- An online in-class response system is included: no need for the students to purchase additional hardware; they simply use the laptops provided to them through the BSHS program.
All aspects of iSEAL are designed with sharing, data mining, and reuse in mind. A learning object that is included in course materials may also be referenced in a quiz question which tests the student's knowledge of that course. Additionally, the same content can be included in multiple courses, allowing it to be shared by instructors across disciplines to teach concepts from differing perspectives: in other words, to support the CLI's integrated curriculum. An excellent example of this integration is the Periodic Table of Haiku project, a collaboration between Chemistry and Writing faculty. You may visit http://r.umn.edu/haiku to view some of the student work from this project.
Since iSEAL is developed and supported in-house at UMR, the development team is in close proximity to the users of the software. The team is well positioned to respond quickly to support requests, as well as to build relationships with the faculty and to assist them in reaching their pedagogical and research goals. A faculty committee meets regularly with the IT director and iSEAL project manager to discuss future development ideas. Unlike the organizational hierarchy found at most universities, the IT department at UMR is under the umbrella of Academic Affairs, ensuring that IT is fully invested in and understands the mission of the Center for Learning Innovation.
Although used successfully today, iSEAL is still undergoing active development and refinement. Student Affairs staff have begun conversations with IT regarding how iSEAL can be expanded to track additional information about the BSHS program; for example, early alerts could be provided to the student success coaches regarding students who are in need of additional academic assistance.
Pushing the Envelope You May Just Get a Paper Cut
iSEAL is under continuous review and development to keep it a viable cutting edge instruction and data collection tool. The CLI faculty plays a significant role in the development process and ongoing improvement of iSEAL. A formal feature request and review process ensures that the iterative development of iSEAL continues to meet faculty and students’ needs. This arrangement offers benefits, but also challenges in the development process.
The development of iSEAL is unique because of the level of influence the faculty have in the development effort. It is the faculty’s responsibility to request new features and enhancements that they feel would make iSEAL easier to use and make it a more effective tool for daily use. Since the faculty use iSEAL on a regular basis, making use of every aspect of iSEAL in the course of their teaching and research, they become a perfect “feedback loop” to provide development direction to the development team. This makes iSEAL a uniquely end-user driven product.
Collaboration, however, between developers and faculty is not without discord. With a few exceptions, faculty have little experience with software development and, conversely, the development team is not necessarily “in tune” with the academic needs of the faculty. Thus, on the one hand, the faculty’s feature requests may sometimes be based on unrealistic expectations of what is possible to accomplish given the limited resources of the development team. On the other hand, the development team is susceptible to making incorrect assumptions about the faculty’s needs. This can prove wasteful by spending development time on a feature that “misses the mark” and does not satisfy the requirements expected by the faculty for their instruction or research. To counteract these issues, careful attention must be paid by the Technology Advisory Committee prior to approving a feature request; once approved, open communication between the development team, and the faculty requesting the change is paramount to making the development a success.
With this process in place the future direction of iSEAL can be led by the CLI faculty to ensure that its purpose as both an instructional and a research tool continue to be realized. While the groundwork has already been laid, future development is still required to support the evolving needs of the faculty who use iSEAL in the course of their instruction and research. With the support of the campus administration and through the ongoing efforts of the CLI faculty and the iSEAL development team the success of iSEAL as an integrated learning and research tool is ensured to support those needs in the years to come.
Reference
[1] Neuhauser, C. 2012. From Academic Analytics to Individualized Education. (Same issue)