It's about TIME: a general-purpose taxonomy of subjects in medical education

  1. Timothy G Willett1,2,
  2. Kenneth C Marshall3,
  3. Marc Broudo3,
  4. Michael Clarke4

Article first published online: 22 FEB 2008

DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2008.03012.x

Issue

Medical Education

Medical Education

Volume 42, Issue 4, pages 432–438, April 2008

Additional Information

How to Cite

Willett, T. G., Marshall, K. C., Broudo, M. and Clarke, M. (2008), It's about TIME: a general-purpose taxonomy of subjects in medical education. Medical Education, 42: 432–438. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2008.03012.x

Author Information

  1. 1

    Centre for Medical Education, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK

  2. 2

    Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  3. 3

    Division of Educational Support and Development, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

  4. 4

    Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

*Tim Willett, CRI Critical Care Education Network, 751 Parkdale Avenue, Suite 1306, Ottawa, Ontario K1Y 1J7, Canada. Tel: 00 1 613 569 4985 (ext 102); Fax: 00 1 613 569 4986; E-mail: tim.willett@criedunet.org

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 12 MAR 2008
  2. Article first published online: 22 FEB 2008
  3. Received 28 March 2007; editorial comments to authors 9 September 2007; accepted for publication 8 November 2007

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Keywords:

  • education, medical/*classification;
  • curriculum;
  • vocabulary, controlled;
  • Canada

Context  Modern computer technology permits the creation of detailed, dynamic electronic curriculum maps to facilitate curriculum searching, organisation and quality assurance. However, when attempting to map curricular content, a common question to arise is: ‘To what should we map our curriculum?’ With respect to content (i.e. the subject being taught, learned or examined), mapping to terminal outcomes or competencies may be too broad, whereas mapping to learning objectives is too specific.

Methods  To address this problem, the authors created TIME-ITEM (topics for indexing medical education; en Français: index des thèmes pour l’éducation médicale), a hierarchical taxonomy of topics relevant to medical education. It is a general-purpose, intermediate-granularity, standardised index that covers the entire range of subject matter in medical education. The content and structure of topics within TIME was developed in consultation with medical educators and librarians at several Canadian medical schools. As far as possible, the language used is standardised to the Unified Medical Language System.

Results  TIME is available as a web application that allows users from various schools to enter their school-specific outcomes, competencies and learning objectives, and then link these to the standardised topics in a way that is meaningful to the school. The entire TIME content and structure can then be exported, via xml, to external applications and used as an index for curriculum mapping, meta-tagging learning objects, or categorising examination questions. TIME can be viewed at http://www.time-item.org (username: ‘guest’; password: ‘guest’).

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