From the establishment of Kaohsiung Medical University, the university takes “cultivation of professional medical specialists, taking care of the public’s physical and mental health, and giving care to unprivileged groups” as its mission. In order to achieve these goals, the school is devoted to “cultivating an interdisciplinary healthcare specialist through knowledge and practice.”
Following the government’s policy of cultivating specialists, our school integrates the concept of Kano’s model as a guideline to create a concept of “a chain of cultivating specialists through knowledge and practice,” (see the picture below), which emphasizes students’ abilities in the humanities, profession, employment, and international competency, and at the same time enhancing teachers’ teaching competence.
In addition, by creating a cloud service campus, teaching resources can be integrated. By sharing regional teaching results and resources, all educational institutes in the region can benefit via enhancing the teaching quality and the function of supporting systems. In addition, the self-assessment of educational institutes will be established so as to create an excellent specialist-cultivating campus and to improve the school-running quality. The following are the strategies of cultivating specialists:
- Nurturing students’
humanism quality
by expanding KMU Academy of Life education, creating a cultural and artistic campus, establishing language and cultural network learning systems, making assessments of humanitarian and feedback systems, establishing a humanitarian education and learning model, the student’s “humanism quality” should be strengthened.
- Cultivating the ability of health professionalism
by creating a course model which integrates knowledge with practice, focusing on cultivating specific specialists— specialists of long-term nursing, environmental medicine and toxicology, health management and improvement, and R & D personnel of the biotech industry; meanwhile, giving 14 credit courses centering on the developmental tendency of social healthcare to offer students an interdisciplinary learning process, so at last, by the long-term learning effect tracking database, the student’s learning conditions can be grasped and the “health professionalism ” will be enhanced.
- Cultivating the ability of employment
this involves establishing the index and checking mechanism of the soft power in the common working place, setting up a biomedical database and a consulting platform of starting an enterprise, introducing the student to business trials, and making the campus a friendly environment to start an enterprise so as to enhance the student’s “employability.”
- Cultivating the ability of international competency
this involves expanding international academic exchange, signing dual-semester systems with the 100 best universities in the world, expanding the student’s industry-university cooperation and application of international profession licenses, making a plan for internal volunteers, and creating a learning space with time-space limit in order to strengthen the student’s “international competency.”
- Cultivating teachers’teaching competence
by setting up an index for teaching competence, designing cultivating courses and hands-on workshops, inspecting new teaching assessments and questionnaires of teaching competence objectively, setting up a teaching model, and carrying out paradigm shifts, all teacher’s “teaching competence” can be enhanced.
- Integrating teaching resources
this involves creating a cloud-service E-campus, creating a mobile reading area on campus, establishing a performance index of BI (Business Intelligence), enriching self-study resources so as to carry out “integration of virtual and actual teaching resources.”
- Communication of regional teaching resources
by enriching the teaching resources and support of elementary, junior and senior high schools and universities within the region, adding a zero-mile navigation platform, giving a zero-mile pathway program the goal of “sharing and gaining benefits from regional resources” and “continuing university education” can be achieved.
Specialists are the foundation in maintaining a nation’s competency. Cultivation of specialists is based on higher education instruction such as that found in universities. In order to deal with the rapid changes of the medical environment and the emergence of new diseases, our school has set up a solid base to cultivate “a professional interdisciplinary specialist with knowledge and practice” through teachers’ teaching, students’ learning, course redesigning, internationalization striving, and resource integrating.
We hope that by implementing the strategies above, we can maintain our excellent traditions in medicine and healthcare and cultivate professional specialists meeting the needs of national healthcare and the medical industry.
