A teaching coordinator’s nightmare?

This field report compares the planning and coordination effort of an anatomy teaching coordinator in a subject-oriented standard curriculum with a cross-subject, modularly organized reformed curriculum at a faculty with 600 medical students per year. The distribution of the anatomical teaching over several locations and modules in all semesters, as well as the rotation of these modules within the semester, results in an increased amount of coordination of teaching content and in particular a very complicated timetable. Appropriate and nevertheless non-overlapping allocation of anatomy teaching staff in this timetable is a special challenge. There is no question that interdisciplinary curricula, as called for in the “Master Plan for Medical Studies 2020”, represent progress. However, an increased amount of work in the teaching coordination of the subjects must be taken into account in the realization of such curricula in large faculties, irrespective of the efforts required to convert to a new curriculum.