MEDICOL stands for Medical and Dental Integrated Curriculum On-line. It has become an important curriculum web support tool providing a repository for curricular resources, as well as facilitating communication among many different groups. The purpose of the workshop was to examine how MEDICOL was contributing to the success of courses and programs. We also took into consideration how our ideas may benefit the Expanded Medical Program. The focus questions asked of the participants were:

  • How do you see MEDICOL contributing to the success of your courses/programs?
  • What is working well?
  • What can we improve upon, and/or add?
  • What do you want?

Where I fit in as a participant of this workshop: Currently I’m managing the on-line PBL resource e-reserve pages at the Woodward Biomedical Library. All of the webpages I create are viewed through the MEDICOL WebCT portal. The manner in which MEDICOL operates with my webpages would be a part of the communication with students as well as the libraries at the two new satellite locations at UVIC and UNBC.

Excerpt from the paper: Recommendations on future directions for MEDICOL, June 17, 2004. MEDICOL planning workshop

Vision statements developed in workshop: In 2 years, we want MEDICOL to be a system that (is):

  • Easily enables faculty and staff to manage resources
  • Fosters a barrier-free virtual community
  • Multi-functional, reliable, easy-to-use
  • dynamic, interactive, a comprehensive, representation of the programs
  • Responsive to strategic needs
  • Has flexible appropriate and/or secure access to users
  • Enables easy evaluation of data and users
  • Allows for quality assessment
  • Delivers expanded learning modalities
  • Respects the principles of copyright and intellectual property
  • Promotes innovative distributed teaching and learning
  • sustaining inovative change
  • Provides support through community
  • Matches users needs with ease of access
  • An integral component of our undergraduate medical program
  • Possesses effective tools for locating content

Recommendations:

  • Clearly define a governance structure for MEDICOL that is directly tied to the curriculum
  • Establish strong centralized coordination and management lead by the Educational Technology Manager.
  • Decentralize some of the processes for managing content on MEDICOL providing more control and flexibility for managing the curriculum
  • Design clear, well-understood, documented workflow process