Medical teacher
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Competency-based education in the health care professions has become a prominent approach to postgraduate training in Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries. Competency frameworks devised at national and international levels have been well received, and in many cases mandated, by governing bodies. However, the teaching and assessment of competencies pose questions of practicality, validity, and reliability. ⋯ Competencies and "entrustable professional activities" (EPAs) relate to each other as two dimensions of a grid in which each EPA can be mapped back to a number of competencies. This backward visioning from EPAs to competencies is proposed as a guide to curriculum planning and assessment. The authors discuss experiences with this conceptual model in research, curriculum development and learner assessment.
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Usability testing is widely used in the commercial world during the process of developing new products, especially software and websites. However, it appears to be rarely used in the development of e-learning in medical education. ⋯ Testing under the conditions that the e-learning intervention will typically be used is the preferred method but more extreme situations can provide useful information. Product development should be iterative and rapid cycles of testing and refinement are essential to produce an effective e-learning intervention.
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An educational game is 'an instructional method requiring the learner to participate in a competitive activity with preset rules.' A number of studies have suggested beneficial effects of educational games in medical education. ⋯ The available evidence to date neither confirm nor refute the utility of educational games as an effective teaching strategy for medical students. There is a need for additional and better-designed studies to assess the effectiveness of these games and this article will inform this research.
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Historical Article
Competency-based medical education: theory to practice.
Although competency-based medical education (CBME) has attracted renewed interest in recent years among educators and policy-makers in the health care professions, there is little agreement on many aspects of this paradigm. We convened a unique partnership - the International CBME Collaborators - to examine conceptual issues and current debates in CBME. We engaged in a multi-stage group process and held a consensus conference with the aim of reviewing the scholarly literature of competency-based medical education, identifying controversies in need of clarification, proposing definitions and concepts that could be useful to educators across many jurisdictions, and exploring future directions for this approach to preparing health professionals. ⋯ In this paradigm, competence and related terms are redefined to emphasize their multi-dimensional, dynamic, developmental, and contextual nature. CBME therefore has significant implications for the planning of medical curricula and will have an important impact in reshaping the enterprise of medical education. We elaborate on this emerging CBME approach and its related concepts, and invite medical educators everywhere to enter into further dialogue about the promise and the potential perils of competency-based medical curricula for the 21st century.
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The UK General Medical Council (GMC) in its regulatory capacity conducts formal tests of competence (TOCs) on doctors whose performance is of concern. TOCs are individually tailored to each doctor's specialty and grade. ⋯ The blueprint described was easy to construct and is easy to use. It reflects the knowledge, skills and behaviours (learning outcomes) to be assessed. It guides commissioning of test material and enables the systematic and faithful sampling of common and important problems. The principles described have potential for wider application to blueprinting in undergraduate or clinical training programmes. Such a blueprint can provide the essential link between a curriculum and its assessment system and ensure that assessment content is stable over time.