Pressure from accrediting agents for curricula to focus on student achievement rather than the educational process has driven curricular reform in all health professions, including veterinary medicine. Veterinary educators are currently striving for better, more effective means of developing professionals who are competent to take on the many challenges of modern veterinary practice on graduation. Curriculum mapping is a critical tool to facilitate educational reform. When used to its fullest potential, a well-designed curriculum map should ensure appropriate coverage of content, align teaching and learning with curriculum goals, improve integration across the curriculum, and facilitate demonstration of outcomes to external stakeholders and accrediting agencies (Harden, 2001; Bell, Ellaway, and Rhind, 2009). However, there are additional benefits since the process itself creates an environment for collaboration, reflection on practice, and discussion of individual and collective beliefs about not only what is being taught, but how and why it is being taught (Bester and Scholtz, 2012; Jacobs, 1997; Udelhofen, 2005; Uchiyama and Radin, 2009).

The concept of curriculum mapping was originated in the 1980s by Fenwick English as a means of documenting the learning activities occurring in elementary and high schools (English, 1980). Heidi Hayes Jacobs expanded this concept to an electronic format and has, alongside Susan Udelhofen, become a leading figure in advancing curriculum mapping in K-12 education (Jacobs, 1997; Udelhofen, 2005). While its roots are in elementary education, curriculum mapping has become commonplace in medical education (Willett, 2008; Ellaway et al., 2014). In fact, the Data Collection Instrument required by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) has become so lengthy and detailed, it is almost impossible to address all the information required for medical school accreditation without an electronic curriculum map (LCME, 2015). In 1999, the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) released an online curriculum management and information tool (CurrMIT) designed to facilitate curriculum data collection and reporting (Cohen, 2000; Salas et al., 2003; Cottrell, Linger, and Shumway, 2004). Unfortunately, the format of CurrMIT proved too rigid to accommodate the wide variety of medical school structures so, with the help of MedBiquitous, AAMC created a newer data based called Curriculum Inventory and Reports (CIR; AAMC, 2016). Rather than being a tool to enter curricular data directly, CIR became a tool to house and compare data from different medical education programs (Ellaway et al., 2014). It was designed to receive data from a variety of management systems and link individual school learning outcomes with an overarching competency framework (Englander et al., 2013). CIR is able to generate a variety of reports for the LCME from the data entered, but also can compare one school’s data with dozens of other programs. In the 2015 reporting year, 135 medical colleges in the United States and Canada used CIR to catalog their curriculum structure, content, and delivery methods as well as their different assessment methods, providing an unprecedented opportunity to compare approaches and benchmark best practices in medical education.