Educational Technology & Instructional Design Committee
Executive Summary to Curriculum Redesign Committee, June 2018
Submitted by Janet Corral and Helen Macfarlane
Charge
The Educational Technology & Instructional Design committee focused on two key areas: 1) to form guiding
principles that would inform decisions in subsequent phases of curriculum reform, and; 2) to explore, critically
appraise, and recommend trends in educational technology and instructional design that would foster optimal
learning outcomes at CU SOM and, in some cases, put CU at the leading edge of being an innovative program of
medical education.
Definitions
• Educational Technologies are the tools and infrastructure that support learners & learning, teachers &
teaching, as well as the administrative operations of the CU SOM.
• Instructional design is the formal practice of incorporating evidence-based educational principles
cohesively into the multiple layers of the educational mission: individual lessons, courses, programs, and
assessments.
Guiding Principles
The following principles should be used to guide the subsequent phases of curriculum reform:
• Technology should be thoughtfully incorporated into the education mission where it supports learning
and teaching, using evidence-based principles and human-centered design.
• Instructional design should be incorporated comprehensively within curriculum and assessment
redesign.
• Universal design and Universal access practices should be implemented for curriculum delivery and
assessment.
• CU SOM must work toward simplifying and integrating systems, towards decreasing the complexity of
the technology ecosystem.
• When creating or adopting curricular assets (e.g. lessons, modules, etc), and in purchasing curriculum
support systems, CU SOM should consider the economic scalability of these investments.
• As learners and faculty are distributed across campus, clinical spaces, public and personal spaces, the
digitally enriched CU SOM curriculum should incorporate a mechanism for social presence. That is,
students and faculty must continue to develop community through rich conversations and interactions
within and across digital learning experiences. The backbone to this community is real, in-person
relationships.
Recommendations
Essential
• Make strategic educational technology purchases that allow CU SOM to:
o Support digital education assets (e.g. interactive modules, adaptive quizzing, portfolios,
dashboards) that give learners and faculty insights into what learning is – and isn’t – happening
(e.g. visualization of progress, success, competencies, etc through learning analytics and
portfolios/performance dashboards).
§ Continue to develop the CU SOM education data warehouse to achieve interactive data
visualizations for all education stakeholders; administration, faculty and students
§ Explore systems, processes and resources that would help CU SOM move thoughtfully
into effective use of dashboards and a culture of data use
o Foster higher-order learning outcomes. Electronic Health Record sandbox, Virtual reality,
augmented reality, virtual patients extend CU SOM’s current continuum of simulation offerings
to develop higher-order and complex skills relevant to clinical practice. These also allow CU SOM
to offer consistent learning experiences across distributed clinical and institutional learning
spaces.
o Support the efficient and effective administrative operations (e.g. assessment system and
learning management systems that report into the education data warehouse)
• Partner instructional design experts with faculty and educational administrative leads to design,
develop, implement and evaluate new curriculum and assessments
o Hire instructional designer(s) into an instructional design group
o For Universal Design, work with the CU Online Universal Design expert and set these guiding
principles and best practices as standards within the CU SOM community
• Given that students are curating their own curricular paths using third party platforms (e.g. Osmosis,
SketchyMicro, Firecracker, etc) and open education resources (e.g. YouTube, Massively Open Online
Courses, etc):
o Partner with instructional designers to develop a thoughtful approach to the macro (e.g.
program, year, course levels) and micro design (e.g. week, day, and individual lessons) of the
new curriculum
o Make strategic investments into educational technologies should consider using or creating
open education resources. Leverage existing resources within SOM and CU.
o Actively seek and develop areas where social presence can be improved across both new and
existing digital education experiences. Digital connections should foster learners and faculty in
ongoing conversations and proximal development (i.e. Cognitive apprenticeship; Brown, Collins
& Duguid, 1989)
Suggested
• Pilot educational gaming strategically into the curricula to foster learner engagement and learning
outcomes
• Review specific mobile apps for incorporation into curricular activities. Some mobile apps might also be
focused on education administration; e.g. connecting learners into teams and for doing quizzes for
team-based learning.
