Technical infrastructure for curriculum mapping in medical education: a narrative review

Curriculum mapping is the process of designing a multidimensional model of an educational programme for a complete, more transparent and better-integrated learning experience. Many universities worldwide are building or expanding their technical infrastructure to manage their curricula. Our aim was to deliver a synopsis of current practices and describe the focus of research interest in implementing curriculum mapping tools for medical education. As part of the Building Curriculum Infrastructure in Medical Education (BCIME) project, we conducted a state-of-the-art narrative review of the literature. A systematised search of the PubMed/MEDLINE database for the years 2013-2019 resulted in 352 abstracts, from which 23 full-text papers were included in the final review. From these, we extracted guidance on 12 key characteristics of curriculum mapping tools. The collected experiences formed four thematic categories: visualisations, text descriptions and analysis, the outcome-based approach and adaptability in curriculum mapping. As result of the review, we summarised topics regarding ways of: implementating new competency-based catalogues (like NKLM) in curriculum mapping software (e. g., using dynamic checklists), methods of streamlining the authoring process (e. g., by automatic detection and alignment of action verbs in learning objectives descriptions) and graphical forms of presenting curriculum data (e. g., network visualisations using automatic clustering of related parts of a curriculum based on similarities between textual descriptions). We expect further developments in text-mining methods and visual/learning analytics in curriculum mapping. The collected data informed the design of a new curriculum management system called EduPortfolio, which is currently being implemented by the BCIME project.