Launch of the new MHPE curriculum: “De kop is er af”

Monday 17th May was marked with big red exclamation marks in our calendars. The official start of the new MHPE curriculum came with a lot of excitement! The curriculum committee, together with a team of teachers, have worked very hard on developing the new MHPE curriculum. A big challenge became an even bigger one when everything had to go online and we were all working from home.

Following the MHPE tradition, the new curriculum started with three weeks of intense contact hours, named “Campus 1” in the new curriculum. Contact is a relative concept these days. Nowadays, it’s contact on Zoom rather than on Campus. On May 17 we met a group of 32 enthusiastic students from the Western part of the world (Brazil, Canada, USA) through the middle (the Netherlands, Denmark) to the Eastern part of the world (India, Qatar, Singapore).

Ingredients of the course were: three weeks of hard work, in addition to having a lot of fun. Students collaborated on designing creative blueprints of a course. Each from their own home and in their own time zone, nevertheless, day by day we felt the groups of students transforming to a team of students. Although we only got to know them from behind screens, after three weeks we did feel we got to know all of them better (from pets and children passing the screen, to coffee and tea favorites, to backdrops).

At this moment in July, our MHPE partners in Canada and New York have also welcomed their new cohort to Campus 1 and the new curriculum. The students will all join the Maastricht cohort in the online courses that follow Campus 1.

Overall, we look back on a successful start to the curriculum. In Dutch there is a saying “de kop is er af” (“the head is off”), the first step is taken. In the next steps of the new curriculum the adventure continues, and we look forward to it all!

Maryam Asoodar, Janneke Frambach & Jill Whittingham

Team Campus 1