Traditional curriculum mapping is often slow, cumbersome, and difficult. Gathering faculty to discuss, reach consensus, and document precisely what and how a curriculum is delivered can be a considerable challenge. We propose a novel technology that greatly simplifies and minimizes the effort of mapping the curriculum, occurs in real time, and yields a much more detailed, clear, accurate, and precise representation of how the curriculum is actually delivered.
Our solution replaces often disparate technologies used for curriculum inventory, delivery, and scheduling with a unified interface for administration, staff, faculty, and students. Faculty upload learning items in the course of normal curriculum delivery as they would in typical learning management systems, using an easy to fill out web form, where they indicate all pertinent information regarding the learning item through a series of required, simple, quick, drop-down, check-box, auto-fill, and radio button controls.
The system uses information captured in the required fields to automatically and continuously generate the curriculum map, an easily searchable and downloadable grid of every learning activity and their pertinent details. All relevant data is easily imported into spreadsheet, statistical analysis software, databases and data warehouses, to facilitate qualitative, quantitative, and visualization techniques for discovering opportunities for curricular improvement and optimization.
Audience Outcomes:
1. Understand the history, context, definition, and application of curriculum mapping.
2. Realize how curriculum mapping is achieved through a grassroots technical solution.
3. Apply this understanding at one’s home institution, to implement such a system to facilitate more effective, accurate, and real-time curriculum mapping.

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Terence Ma is the Assistant Dean for Education Information Resources at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he is responsible for the curriculum management and learning management systems, curriculum inventory, and innovative technologies for teaching and learning. He received his PhD in Anatomy from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1987.

Gerald Thrush is the Assistant Dean, Pre-clinical Education at COMP, where he has implemented new modalities of curricular delivery as well as computer-based testing for medical student courses. Gerald received his PhD in Immunology and Microbiology from Wayne State University in 1990.

Scott Helf is Assistant Dean of Academic Informatics at COMP, where his role is to solve particularly vexing educational challenges through adapting existing, or creating new, information technology solutions. He received his MSIT from California State University Fullerton in 2007, and the DO degree from COMP in 1999.