College of Veterinary Medicine Curriculum Design Session
Case Study
learning design, design thinking, facilitation, project management
Driving Question
How can veterinary education be redesigned into a competency-based model that accounts for students' mental, financial, and social health?
Context
The MSU College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) was working to revise their curriculum to a competency-based model and identify new strategies for preparing veterinarians that were attentive to their mental health and well-being. Competency-based education focuses on ensuring that students can demonstrate particular skills and knowledge before continuing along in their educational journeys, rather than simply completing the assignments for a given course. Nationally, medical education has been moving into a competency-based framework to help provide students with more hand-on experiences before heading into their clinical rotations. For veterinary students, this means having more opportunities to engage with animals beginning in the first year of their programs.
CVM approached the MSU Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology (MSU Hub) to help facilitate initial conversations around their vision, goals, and approaches to how they could prepare future veterinarians. They wanted to embed a design thinking-led approach to their work that centered the needs of students within the program.
Process
To kick off the curriculum redesign process, my MSU Hub colleagues and I led a design-thinking based workshop focused on surfacing key priorities and establishing a clear vision for CVM’s curriculum development process. We led participants through a series of generative activities focused on what a “day one ready” veterinarian would know, understand, and feel at the end of their veterinary education. We also facilitated discussions on the key challenges and opportunities of early-career veterinarians, and had groups sketch out ideas for the ideal journey map of a student’s experience.
My colleagues and I analyzed the data generated through the session (categorizing and coding hundreds of post-its to identify patterns) and created a summary report documenting the insights from the session. From these conversations, the college aligned around the vision that they wanted to develop a curriculum that was attentive to students' mental health, reduced their debt, and left them feeling confident and prepared on the first day of their careers.
During the second phase of the project, I worked with individual faculty groups to provide support as they worked to adopt a flipped classroom model, providing feedback on their ideas for their recorded lectures and in-class activities as well as helping faculty remain attentive to the curriculum development deadlines to ensure the course was designed with plenty of time to iterate and review. I helped faculty brainstorm ways to implement active learning strategies within the in-person segments of the courses, articulate what prior knowledge would need to be established within the asynchronous course materials to help students succeed, and ensure their efforts were aligned with the competency-based objectives for their course.
Results
The work with MSU CVM was one of the first projects at the MSU Hub and one of our first instances of applying design thinking strategies within higher education design. One of the key criticisms of design thinking sessions is that the work and effort from design thinking sessions gets lost as participants return to the realities and the flow of everyday work, and that the methods within these sessions sometimes do not acknowledge the very real challenges that can be barriers to implementation. As my colleague Leigh Graves Wolf noted in her recap blog post, we spent considerable time after our design workshop thinking of what kind of analysis and synthesis work could help sustain the momentum and ideas generated in the workshop. Our report synthesized the outcomes of the design thinking activities into key takeaways and provided action items that the college was able to follow up on and reference as they continued in their curriculum reinvention process.
Working with the CVM faculty also enhanced my abilities to work within and across disciplines where I am not well-versed or familiar with the content. Many of the faculty had not worked with a learning designer before, and there was initial hesitancy trusting how I might be able to help them when I was not a veterinary professional myself (as well as some intimidation of the subject matter on my part!). However, I found myself leveraging my skills as a facilitator, my knowledge of pedagogy, and my project management skills to both build trust within the teams and find ways into veterinary medicine that enabled the groups to move forward and make improvements in the course. When our work concluded, one faculty member even highlighted how essential it was to her process to work with me and listen to my production advice.
My organizational change management skills developed significantly through the process of working with CVM. Although my work was primarily focused on ensuring materials were developed utilizing active learning principles and the course was student-ready in time for the curricular launch, an even larger part of my role was helping our partners navigate the ups and downs of implementing significant change. I was consistently working with individuals who were going to be teaching in new and different ways than they had experienced before, which can generate anxiety as much as it can generate excitement. Being attentive to how faculty were feeling ensured a smoother development process and kept our efforts responsive and attentive to faculty needs as college-level leadership shifted and changed.