Lessons from industry: one school's transformation toward "lean" curricular governance.

As medical education grapples with organizational calls for centralized curricular oversight, programs may be compelled to respond by establishing highly vertical, stacked governance structures. Although these models offer discrete advantages over the horizontal, compartmentalized structures they are designed to replace, they pose new challenges to ensuring curricular quality and the educational innovations that drive the curricula. The authors describe a hybrid quality-assurance (QA) governance structure introduced in 2003 at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine (UKCOM) that ensures centralized curricular oversight of the educational product while allowing individualized creative control over the educational process.

Service learning in the medical curriculum: developing and evaluating an elective experience.

Background: Medical educators are seeking ways to nurture the service commitments of their medical students while promoting interactions with the communities they serve. Service learning is a pedagogy that links community service with academic experience.

Description: The University of Kentucky College of Medicine has developed and implemented an experiential service learning elective.

How we implemented a service-learning elective.

This paper describes the process used to introduce a service-learning course into the medical curriculum at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. The rationale for taking the initiative to begin such a project is outlined and curriculum planning considerations are reviewed, including how to identify project team members, choose community agency partners, develop the instructional plan, and define roles and responsibilities of the participants. The importance of understanding the philosophy of service learning and taking time for reflection are underscored.

Medical students' ratings of faculty teaching in a multi-instructor setting: an examination of monotonic response patterns.

Realizing that the psychometric properties of a measure may be highly variable is especially relevant in a multi-instructor context, since an implicit assumption is that student ratings are equally reliable and valid for all faculty ratees. As a possible indicator of nonattending (i.e.