Unravel your curriculum
Improve your curriculum by visualizing structured curriculum information and stimulating the 'constructive conversation' between teachers, students and managers.
Simplifying constructive alignment
Act-E is developed by the department of Medical Informatics and offered by the Teaching & Learning Centre (TLC) of the Amsterdam UMC (location AMC). It provides an online platform to gather structured curriculum information and supports the process of constructive alignment. It helps educational teams to have a well-informed discussions and deliver high-quality education.
Organisations
Help educational teams to create and maintain high quality curricula. Monitor the realization of an educational vision and policy by analyzing and aggregating the detailed data of curricula, such as information related to courses, learning objectives, pathways and specialisations. Fortify the pool of business information by adding curriculum information.
Curriculum managers
Be in-control and maintain, analyse and improve a curriculum based on structured curriculum information. Have well-informed discussions with course coordinators and teachers and steer on structure and consistency. Make accreditations easy by using the already available data such as coverage matrices related to exit qualifications.
Teachers
Design courses and learning pathways in a structured way while having the context information readily available on how learning objectives are embedded in the overall curriculum. Have constructive discussions with fellow teachers on an improved build-up of longitudinal topics and reduction of overlap. Store design related information, like notes, assessment plans, teaching plans, in one place and benefit from the generated information you only have to augment (e.g., assessment matrix).
Students
Get insight in the structure of education. Be better prepared for courses and easily find the occurrence of topics throughout the curriculum. Get in the head of the teachers and see the (overall) design they envision. Manage the work-life balance better.
Features
Aligned curriculum
One source of structured curriculum information to analyse and visualize the complex interconnections between curriculum information. Align goals, assessments and activities and show the realization of the diploma. Share consistent and evolving information with you teachers, students and other stakeholders.
Re-use high quality info
Gather high quality curriculum information at the right person. Enable teachers, and others, to design and maintain their own educational information. Reduce data-loss when persons leave the organisation. Re-use information that is collected once and use it for multiple purposes.
Insights and signals
Analyse the readily available information and identify overlap, missing pieces or mismatches in level, didactical vision, or teacher professionalisation. No restrictions on the design by teachers but add guiding principles and facilitate the constructive conversation based on identified signals from the information.
Visualizations & heatmaps
Use easy visualizations, such as tables and heatmaps, to analyse and talk about the curriculum. Use the same visualisations for alignment of the information to get a consistent curriculum. Easily navigate from course level to program level to group level and back, and review the information as you need.
Customization
Tailor act-E to domain specific needs by adding custom competence and reference frameworks to 'tag' goals, assessments and activities. Configure custom terminology and branding such as logo and colour. Batch import data via copy-paste of a spreadsheet or create together with us a direct connection with external data sources.
Guidelines & support
Add custom description templates to guide users to fill in the right information. Besides the generic help, define custom help sections that support users at the right spot and time. Incorporate domain specific didactical guidelines for a complete picture for the users.
What our users say...
Now it is possible to be in-control of my curriculum and continuously work on its quality.
(Curriculum manager)
Finally, an easy way to get insights in the history, continuity and overlap of the topics in my courses.
(Teacher)
I can see how different topics build-up and come back in future courses.
(Student)
Accreditations becomes a breeze, as the self-reflection parts on the curriculum and assessments are already covered by act-E.
(Educational policy maker)
Why act-E?
- Manage one central source of reliable curriculum information for all stakeholders.
- Use it as a structured studyguide, also for non-registered curricula like pre-masters or professionalisation programs.
- Make sure that the exit qualifications that constitute the diploma are realized by the courses in the curriculum.
- Enable stakeholders to communicate effectively on educational innovation and quality.
- Support the efficient design of a new curriculum or the maintainance of an existing curriculum.
- Be in-control and have the foundation for data-driven steering mechanisms.
- Facilitate accreditations and the writing of self-reflections.
- Enable transferable education by building a solid knowledge base for teachers and coordinators.
- Ensure effective internal and external communication about programs and courses.
- Give students a transparent view on the design of courses and the curriculum as a whole, to facilitate well-informed learning.