Curriculum integration for dental education : A lesson learned from real experiences of development and implementation

This paper presents a dental school's experience of curriculum development and the process of implementation. It includes the things that can be expected to happen or that may go beyond expectations in the development of new curriculum for the College of Dentistry (School of Dentistry), Seoul National University. In 2002, the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development of Korea announced Introduction of new school system in which provides medical and dental education after bachelor's degree. This "Professional Graduate School" system is one of the greatest challenges for Korean dental education. Now Korean dental schools chose two different dental education systems from 2005, the six year dental college system and the four year professional dental graduate school system. College of Dentistry, Seol National University chose the new system. The school also changed curriculum. The change of dental education system is one, but not all of the reason for the curriculum reform. Through the sophisticated process of problem identification and needs assessments, we chose the integrated curriculum. A careful planning and organization process were applied. The whole process of curriculum development took ten month. The evaluation is still going on. Even the curriculum intended to apply the solid principles and aims towards sound objectives; the curriculum evaluationin the present is not very encouraging. It casts lots of pending questions. Promising part of the new curriculum has the flexibility and readiness to change of environment