Curriculum Data Exchange

The development of health professions education curricula is a time-consuming and complex task. Educational reform efforts are encouraging the development of nontraditional curricula that use novel and innovative methods for teaching and assessment. In many institutions, there is a push toward competency-based learning as the cornerstone of curriculum development efforts. In addition, health professions reform has mandated that new content or competencies be integrated into the curricula, including cultural competencies, patient safety, team-based learning, systems-based practice, etc.  

In parallel, a predicted shortage of physicians has resulted in the growth of new medical schools in the United States and other countries. Such schools have the herculean task of developing medical school curricula from scratch.  

Institutions could facilitate their curriculum reform and development efforts by sharing curricular data with one another. A shared curriculum inventory would allow institutions to find out how other institutions are addressing common problems, implementing reforms, and integrating novel teaching and assessment techniques into the curricula. A technology standard for core curricular data is essential to enable sharing of curricular information and to accelerate the dissemination of curricular innovations. 

Mission

Develop data standards to enable the exchange of curriculum content and curriculum management data across organizations and systems. 

Benefits

• Provides a data structure allowing representation of a health professions curriculum in a standard format. 

• Enables the aggregation of curriculum data across the continuum of professional education and training for research and benchmarking purposes. 

Charter

Download the charter (PDF)

Download Standards and Guidelines

MedBiquitous standards and guidelines are freely available under an open license. Use the links below to download the standards and guidelines.

Version 1.0

• Curriculum Inventory Specification (PDF)

• Curriculum Inventory Implementation Toolkit (ZIP, 917 KB)

• Curriculum Inventory Implementation Guidelines (PDF)

• Curriculum Inventory Schema (XSD)

• Curriculum Vocabularies (PDF)

Version 2.0 Working Draft

• Curriculum Inventory Specification (PDF)

• Curriculum Inventory Schema (XSD)

“v10” Point Release for AAMC Curriculum Inventory 2022 Upload Season

• Curriculum Inventory Specification (PDF)

• Curriculum Inventory Schema (XSD) 

• AAMC Curriculum Inventory 2022 Sample Data (XML) 

JSON Schema

• Curriculum Inventory Schema (JSON)

New Curriculum Standards Being Explored in 2023

MedBiquitous has launched an exploratory working group to identify potential standards requirements for a Health Professions Education Curriculum Exchange (HPECE), focusing on open development and dissemination, validating the need for a network exchange model, and identifying potential end users. The HPECE working group will keep other related MedBiquitous groups, such as the Curriculum Data Exchange working group, informed to ensure curriculum standard alignment.