A Study on the Integrated Medical Teaching Courses Administration at Seoul National University College of Medicine for the Past Thirty Years

Shin, Jwa Seop; Lee, Yoon Sung

Abstract

It was about thirty years ago that integrated teaching courses were first introduced to the undergraduate medical educational curriculum in Korea. Seoul National University College of Medicine, who had totally discipline-based curriculum up to 1971, implemented the new curricular component which was benchmarked from the experiment of Case Western University (USA) in 1950s, and accommodated it to her educational environment fairly delicately at least for the first ten years, and her pioneering experiment played a role-model to many medical colleges in Korea. However, the integrated courses(1/4 of basic medical science learning period) became stereotyped in curricular management, distended in contents, became more and more lecture-dependent, despite basic principles advocated at the implementation stage which emphasized diversification in learning methods, and at last fell to a faulty component in curriculum. And it became a serious handicap hindering the latest endeavor for curricular innovation aiming at a whole, vertical and horizontal curricular integration. From analysis of various numerical data and historical records, we arrived at the following conclusions: integrated curricular component should be supervised and evaluated continuously by a powerful standing committee far more than non-integrated one should be; success in the formation of multi-departmental consensus group which is influenced by cultural or political factor of the country or the medical professional society, is a precondition to run it successfully; an integration of curriculum not only requires deliberate technical manipulation of educational contents and diversification of learning methods but also requires a philosophical or political innovation in medical society to overcome firm and high inherited barrier between departments.