The National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI), co-chaired by David Ross, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, has created a 14-day "Quarantine Curriculum” designed to capture foundational concepts in modern psychiatric neuroscience and make them clear and accessible through online, interactive experiences.
The NNCI Quarantine Curriculum will be run in real time, with each day focusing on a specific theme. All materials, including recordings of the live class sessions, will then be freely available afterward via the NNCI website so that people can complete them on their own.
While the intended audience is psychiatry residents and fellows, organizers anticipate that materials will be equally useful across the full spectrum of UME, GME, and CME audiences.
The curriculum will begin March 18. It was built in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, which is posing countless challenges to society and the health care system.
For medical educators, one emerging difficulty is how to ensure optimal learning for students when conventional approaches are constrained — whether due to general disruption to clinical services (requiring coverage by trainees and faculty), because in-person activities cannot be held due to social-distancing policies, or for people who are forced into quarantine or cannot leave their homes due to childcare responsibilities.
Fortunately, modern approaches to teaching and learning offer a range of ready responses, including leveraging pre-existing self-study and model curriculum resources and the use of technology to create e-learning experiences.
NNCI is comprised of psychiatry educators committed to making core concepts in neuroscience accessible and clinically relevant for a broad audience. The educators rely on a collaborative approach with a peer-review process for generating and reviewing content.
Resources include interactive classroom sessions, brief accessible reviews, and short videos for self-study and teaching in clinical settings.