Curriculum Development

Online curriculum development for student midwives is challenging. Some days it can feel like you are wadding through treacle and other days an easy 5,000 words flow through your fingers onto a word document (rare moments, probably once in the last 9months!).

The last couple of months I have been challenged, creating two online modules simultaneously. I work collaboratively with a different tutor for each module and a web developer. My role is to develop the content.

The process begins when I look at the content of the module and I come up with ideas as to what I believe needs to be covered. I usually have an online skype meeting with each tutor then to see if my ideas fit in with what they believe should be covered and what has already been discussed at the university. It is vital at this stage that I have an idea of what has already been covered with the students to avoid repetition.

Once the subjects have been decided on I then begin a creative process of attempting to brainstorm some ideas of how it can be covered in a way that measures the learning outcomes of the module.

Last semester the course I developed involved very practical 'nursy' type tasks this meant step by step images needed to be found to support the text and make it more engaging.

This semester involves evaluating the students ability to plan and evaluate midwifery care. The idea for one of the modules was to create 'case notes' for students to immerse themselves in and describe and document their actions in response to the circumstances that were developing. I was very naive. I believed in no time at all I could reel off five cases creating the scenarios. Actually this is a very time consuming approach, interesting but time consuming. It involves plenty of digging into the depth of my creative mind.

The second module has evolved using two approaches. I have developed case scenario's for the students to plan care for but I also wanted them to gain experience EVALUATING midwifery care. The difficulty is how to evaluate midwifery care given without 'real' women that can demonstrate the effects of midwifery care. So I have asked the student midwives to assume the role of 'expert midwife witness' to some coroner cases. In these cases the coroner has called upon a midwife to evaluate the midwifery care provided and the midwife provides a report based on the questions asked. The students use the readings provided, reference their code of conduct and write a report to present at WIMBA sessions.

Some of the subjects have involved midwifery care given to women with complex problems this has meant there has been at times a wee bit of procrastination. Also like any writing I often am staring at the screen wondering where I am going with the story. It is at this point that I need to revisit the learning outcomes and what we are trying to achieve with the module.

Collaboration

Working in an online environment in a collaborative manner has its difficulties. Deciding on a tool to use which everyone can access and avoids multiple documents floating around is a good starting point. Last semester I tried email back and forth of a word document. The biggest drawback of this is following review comments, tracking changes and ending up with a full inbox of multiple copies of the same module. This can lead to confusion and I intensely dislike trying to read the document once multiple people have added their comments along the side.

This time the process began using google documents. I created a document for each module and added the collaborators. My intentions were that any of us could work on the document at any one time the changes would be there and there would be one complete document at the end of the process. There were a number of difficulties with this. Not all the collaborators were able to access and see the document. The biggest difficulty was that any collaborator could see if any work at all had been done on the document. This is not good for a bulk worker like me who procrastinates and thinks things over before actually committing to writing. I then suffered some difficulties when I tried to access the document via my laptop when on holiday and after a night of tears and tantrums I had to turn to dropbox to try and find a solution.

Dropbox still means that i work within a word document and then load it up. It definitely cuts back on documents in my inbox but I still don't feel entirely happy with this option.

If anyone has any other ideas feel free to let me know.