CurrMIT: a tool for managing medical school curricula

The AAMC Curriculum Management & Information Tool (CurrMIT) is a relational database containing curriculum information from medical schools throughout the United States and Canada. CurrMIT can be used to document details of instruction, such as outcome objectives, resources, content, educational methods, assessment methods, and educational sites, which are being employed in curricula. CurrMIT contains basic information about nearly all required courses and clerkships being offered in the United States and Canada. The database contains descriptions of more than 15,000 courses and clerkships; approximately 115,000 "sessions"--e.g., lectures, labs, small-group discussions--and more than 400,000 keywords and word strings documenting the specific details of instruction associated with the courses, clerkships, and sessions. Some specific uses that schools have made of CurrMIT include review of demographics among patient cases being used in a case-based curriculum; comparisons of educational experiences between two geographically separate clinical campuses; and identification of unplanned redundancies and gaps in curricular content. CurrMIT has been designed to accommodate data from virtually any medical school curriculum; "traditional 2+2" curricula, problem-based curricula, and systems-based curricula, and variations of each of these, have been entered in CurrMIT by medical schools. The authors give an overview of the technology upon which the system is built and the training materials and workshops that the AAMC provides to faculty to support CurrMIT's use, and end by describing enhancements being planned for the system.