Curriculum Review Project
The University of Alberta is committed to increasing awareness of global health problems. To that end, the Global Health Curriculum Development focus was designed to:
- Determine the essential global health elements of curriculum content
- To assess existing curriculum for those essential elements
- To develop strategies for enhancing the curriculum in respect to international health issues
This program encouraged students to help improve the program by identifying portions of the curriculum that needed development. This began by analyzing the current core content and then having students identify core topics or introduce new topics. They would then develop and design curriculum supplements.
Several years ago an assessment of the existing curriculum of the Faculty of Medicine was carried out under the supervision of Dr. Chris Cheeseman with the CurrMIT package and examined the elements defined as essential curriculum content for international health. These are outlined below in the form of a project.
Tasks for Students
- Determine global health issues, general and specific.
Students will review curriculum content from University of Arizona, University of Toronto and University of Calgary-recognized institutions with a focus on international and global health. This will yield an overview of background issues in the following areas:
- International and global health,
- Health determinants,
- Health indicators,
- General impact of socioeconomic education environmental, and
- Political impact on health,
- Health systems, including primary health care.
The specific issues will examine infectious diseases which have a heavy burden internationally, specifically childhood pneumonia, childhood diarrhea, malaria, TB and HIV.
- The student will develop strategies for implementing global health curriculum into the existing structure.
Students work with supervisors to identify topics by developing case material that allows discussion of comparative issues. They will also design a strategy for the implementation of these tools.
The students will work closely with the Office of Global Health in conjunction with UME.
Expected Outcome
- The Global Health Curriculum Review will yield a database of information about essential elements of international and global health and knowledge required by today's UAlberta Graduate.
- The review will identify existing content and opportunities for intervention.
- The project will develop a strategy for implementation with some sample tools for this development; innovation in competency based education is sought.
Report
The results of the curriculum review are available for viewing on this website. This example was conducted by James Felix (Medical Class of 2003) as part of an international health summer student project.