Aquifer is excited to announce that the Aquifer Sciences curriculum database is now available to the public free of charge via Aquifersciences.org.
The database houses the Aquifer Sciences initiative core curriculum, developed in collaboration with the International Association of Medical Science Educators. Four years in development, the Aquifer Sciences curriculum is the first nationally-developed and publicly available curriculum that comprehensively outlines the core basic sciences concepts that must be understood and mastered by health professions learners in order to provide safe, routine patient care.
The core curriculum is the result a massive collaborative effort by a nationally representative and multi-institutional team of over 100 leading science and clinical educators, along with senior medical student curriculum interns from across the country. The curriculum database includes:
- 11 basic science disciplines
- 9 clinical disciplines
- 105 core concepts
- 789 learning objectives
- 366 common conditions
- 5 clinical decisions
- 15 systems
The Aquifer Sciences curriculum is delivered through a customizable search and filter database that allows users to access the information they need with ease. The carefully curated curriculum information, combined with easy-to-use, openly available online access, makes the Aquifer Sciences database an extremely valuable tool for educators and during their curriculum planning processes. The core curriculum provides a common conceptual language and integrated curricular methodology enables curricular planning and meaningful conversations between basic science and clinical educators.
“We are so thrilled to launch the Aquifer Sciences curriculum database. This is the culmination of so many years of hard work by such an incredibly dedicated team. It’s a wonderful feeling to have the database available to the public, and we look forward to hearing feedback from educators as they dig in and start making use of this tool,” said Leslie Fall, Aquifer Executive Director and Chief Academic Officer. “We believe this project fills a critical need in health care education. The team is excited to continue our mission of integrating basic science and clinical learning by moving forward with the next phase of the initiative this year—the virtual patient cases.”
The curriculum database is the key first component of the larger Aquifer Sciences initiative. Aquifer Sciences is a partnership between Aquifer, a non-profit organization, and the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) to develop and share teaching and learning tools that integrate the basic and clinical sciences. The goal of the initiative is to promote cognitive integration and collaborative teaching of the basic and clinical sciences in health professions education. Future project components, currently in development, include the development of virtual patient cases with integrated illness scripts for over 300 core conditions, which will follow Aquifer’s proven pedagogy and existing course library model. The virtual patient cases are expected to become available via Aqueduct, Aquifer’s learning management system, in 2019. Following the launch of the cases, the Aquifer Sciences team will develop classroom resources to support active learning and collaborative faculty facilitation, tentatively available in 2020.
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