Kansas City University College of Dental Medicine
Creating space for curricular creativity while using data to anchor outcomes and meet accreditation benchmarks
Overview
Curriculum development in health professions education requires more than a good idea—it demands strategy, structure, and evidence. At Kansas City University’s College of Dental Medicine, Dr. Erinne Kennedy, Assistant Dean of Curriculum and Integrated Learning, led the launch of a brand-new program built on innovation, integration, and continuous improvement. This case highlights how KCU established a modern curriculum design process supported by real-time data from day one.
In starting a curriculum, there are two things. One, how are you innovative, and how do you measure that? And two, you have a blank canvas. So what does it look like to declutter what everyone else has cluttered already so that you have an example of what contemporary education looks like?
Dr. Erinne Kennedy
Assistant Dean of Curriculum and Integrated Learning at Kansas City University, College of Dental Medicine
The problem
Creating a new academic program gave KCU’s dental school the freedom to lead with innovation—but also required precision and accountability from the outset. Dr. Kennedy and her team were responsible for developing a fully integrated and measurable curriculum that would serve as a modern model for dental education.
The challenge centered on designing a competency-based framework, ensuring cohesion across biomedical and clinical sciences, and using real-time insights to support continuous curriculum redesign. All of this needed to meet CODA’s rigorous accreditation standards for dental education programs—without the historical clutter of legacy systems.
“We attempted to declutter,” she explained, “to have a more contemporary, fully integrated curriculum across biomedical and clinical sciences… And then we tried to find software that could allow us to track and measure that.”
The solution
To bring structure and innovation into alignment, Dr. Kennedy and her team turned to Enflux to support curriculum development from day one. The platform provided essential curriculum management tools and analytics needed to organize and validate a fully integrated design approach.
Using Enflux, Dr. Kennedy’s team could map programmatic competencies, evaluated integration across courses, and assessed student readiness in real time. Enflux’s support enabled the curriculum design team to build backwards from CODA accreditation standards while staying nimble in response to student outcomes and faculty feedback.
“Using our Enflux data, we added SIM time, hired more tutors, redesigned two clinical courses, and changed student exercises,” said Dr. Kennedy. The result was a curriculum development process that balanced strategic design with measurable results—rooted in innovation and guided by continuous improvement.
The results
When it came time to compile a multi-page institutional effectiveness report for a major accreditation milestone, Dr. Kennedy was able to complete the entire task in under two hours—thanks to real-time insights from Enflux.
That moment revealed the real power of integrated curriculum development supported by EdTech:
- A centralized dashboard for tracking curriculum performance
- Tools for quickly validating curriculum changes and clinical readiness
- Alignment between accreditation requirements and real-time learning metrics
- Empowered decision-making without administrative overload
“It took me about 90 minutes to compile a multi-page institutional effectiveness report. If I didn’t have the data and couldn’t just screen grab exactly what I needed, it would’ve taken weeks.”
Dr. Erinne Kennedy
Assistant Dean of Curriculum and Integrated Learning at Kansas City University
“To me, that’s a huge win. To have real-time data that I can analyze, discuss, and present at any point in time—I don’t think there’s a bigger win than that.”
Dr. Erinne Kennedy
Assistant Dean of Curriculum and Integrated Learning at Kansas City University