Students design their own curriculum: An experiment to maintain students' enthusiasm

Believing that the most important factor for learning is learner’s enthusiasm, we suppose that designing their own curriculum will keep students’ enthusiasm alive. Thus, enthusiastic students will be better learners. We were curious about what would have happened if students had the opportunity to design their own curriculum. An online questionnaire, consisting of a main board with all courses and open questions, asked medical students and recent graduates to place all core and option courses in the semester they would like to be taught. 79 (8%) of all 993 Ioannina University Medical students participated; 46 (58%) were positive on deciding their own curriculum from the first year; 7%–85% (mean 49.4%) would like to study core courses, and 24%–95% (67.5%) electives, in a different semester. Studying with a personalized curriculum was welcomed. Half of core courses and two thirds of optional were desired to be studied in a different semester than the current curriculum predicts. If all students had participated, the same, if not greater, dispersion would be expected. It’s important to give students the opportunity to carve their own course curriculum, in order to keep and increase their enthusiasm, responsibility and accountability, and in order to match with their teachers’ enthusiasm.