Historically Black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, has announced that it is revamping its curriculum in order to better prepare students for health care in the digital age by introducing new teaching strategies such as earlier clinical immersion and “flipped” classrooms. The goal of the new curriculum will be to prepare students to be critical-thinkers who can easily adapt to future innovations.
The new curriculum includes decreasing the number of lectures and replacing them with active-learning strategies such as team-based teaching and flipped classrooms. In the flipped classroom, students receive the lecture part of a class on their own time, at their own pace (such as online, through videos, audio recordings, readings, or exercises). Students spend their class time working in small groups to apply what they have learned.
The new curriculum is set to begin in fall 2018 with the students in the Class of 2022. Current students will continue the current curriculum until it is phased out in 2021.