Using the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ to Innovate in Health Professions Pre-Registration Curriculum Design

This thesis's subject of inquiry is the role of crowdsourcing as a technological tool to enable stakeholder contribution in health professions education curricu-lum design, specifically the application of crowdsourcing in a local periodic di-agnostic radiography degree programme revalidation. The stakeholder groups the research focused on were students, patients, and the public. Informed by a narrative literature review of crowdsourcing in health professions education, the research aimed to establish if crowdsourcing could be deployed to support the involvement of these stakeholders when designing a pre-registration diagnostic radiography programme at a single Higher Education Institute. Due to the lim-ited evidence uncovered on the topic and the identified studies mapping to the 'systems' aspect of Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, this lens was applied to this study. A pragmatic, action research approach using an embedded mixed methods design afforded the ability to explore how the crowdsource would need to be designed to enable students, patients, and pub-lic participation. Methodically applying Wadsworth's complete cycle questions and using the critical learning from each cycle for the preceding cycle sup-ported understanding of how the tool could be employed in the curriculum de-sign process. The final product of these 'reflect and refine' activities was a set of six (ICARUS) design principles that could be applied by other health profes-sions educators seeking to use crowdsourcing in this way. Findings also demonstrated that people did engage with the opportunity, and those that joined represented a diverse demographic. Moreover, following a review of con-temporary radiography education literature, crowd ideas were included in the updated curriculum programme specification. The impact of Covid-19 on the work and how the increasing use of digital data collection tools during this time has amplified the interest in crowdsourcing is discussed. The work recognises several limitations alongside recommending areas for future research.