Less is more. That is the guiding principle that probably best describes our change in approach to Vital Signs this year. We are moving from four editions each academic year to eight editions on a monthly basis from October to May. Each edition will be shorter, specifically highlighting developments in educational development, B-CLR or program evaluation, followed by the usual announcements and resource updates. 

 

Our goal with Vital Signs is to keep CHM educators informed about innovations and resources for educational development and blended learning. We also use Vital Signs to disseminate recent medical education scholarship and findings from our on-going evaluation of the curriculum for quality improvement. Our hope is that with the shorter format, it will be easier for readers to find the content of most interest to them. It will also allow us to more readily pass on important announcements of upcoming events and important new resources in a timely manner.

 

As we enter the final countdown to the implementation of the Shared Discovery Curriculum for the incoming class of 2016, it is hard to imagine anyone who will not be affected by the change. 


The new curriculum has four structural components that make it fundamentally different from how we have historically approached undergraduate medical education: (a) significant early clinical experience, (b) a curriculum completely integrated around patients' chief complaints and concerns, (c) the use of both knowledge and skill-based progress testing to assess the developing competencies of our learners, and (d) the use of learning societies as our infrastructure for curriculum delivery. These features will not only transform the way we approach education, together they make our curriculum distinctive among the many approaches being tried at other medical schools. Although it is currently under redevelopment, the Shared Discovery Curriculum website has many useful resources, including recordings of all of the Town Hall meetings since 2012. To review the last Town Hall on October 5, please visit http://curriculum.chm.msu.edu/townhalls.html to see the recording and Prezi slide presentation.

 

While Vital Signs will not exclusively focus on the Shared Discovery Curriculum, it is hard to imagine that it too could remain untouched in the coming year when there is such significant change ahead. So perhaps "less is more" as used here is less poetic than Robert Browning's imagery in his poem Andrea del Sarto. Perhaps in our case, less is more is primarily a practical response to our state of change as a college, although I see it as much as an empirical question that we will test this year.