The Curriculum Renewal project team is proud to be celebrating achieving this milestone.
It's official. The School of Dentistry's proposed changes to the dental curriculum are approved and coming in to effect in the Fall of 2019.
The Class of 2023 will be the first group of students to enroll in the curriculum as part of the Curriculum Renewal (CR) project at the school. After a year of rigorous reviews and processes, the proposed calendar changes to the curriculum and new academic regulations have been accepted and approved by the University of Alberta.
"Without this approval we wouldn't be able to proceed," says Steve Patterson, associate chair, academic and professor. "We have hit the point of no return and it's a cause for celebration. It is such an important step in the process of the curriculum renewal project."
The school embarked on this curriculum project in 2015 and has been steadily working to build an entirely new dentistry curriculum. The new curriculum will improve the learning of dental students through changes such as sequencing material in a way that supports and strengthens the learning between foundational dental and medical content to every day practice.
The majority of 2018 has been spent on aligning the course changes with the CR project. The approval involved faculty members from across the University of Alberta campus. Under the General Faculties Council's (GFC) the course changes had to be approved by two subcommittees - the GFC Academic Planning Committee and the GFC Academic Standards Committee.
"We received very favourable feedback from these committees. They were very impressed by our changes and made very little modifications or suggestions to us," says Patterson. "The scrutiny from our peers across campus helped us make sure everything looks good. We couldn't be more proud."
The CR project is now in Phase 3 with course design work underway. Courses 1 to 8 are in various stages of design, with the first year of courses ready for implementation in the 2019/20 academic year.
"It's going to be a busy but challenging, and exciting time," says Patterson. "We will have the current curriculum and the new curriculum being offered together."
Patterson says this project would not be possible without the hard work of the course directors, course teams, faculty members, and learning consultant Colleen Starchuk.