Managing Fieldwork, Mapping the Curriculum, and Preparing for ACOTE: Lessons from IU Indianapolis OT

The OTD program at Indiana University Indianapolis has spent several years building a centralized and streamlined approach to managing fieldwork. Today, site availability, rotation scheduling, student experiences and evaluations, and communication with fieldwork partners are managed through CORE ELMS, giving the team one place to coordinate many of the moving pieces involved in getting students into and through fieldwork. 

Now, IU is applying CORE by PeopeGrove’s software to another significant program responsibility: curriculum mapping and accreditation preparation. The program recently began leveraging CORE to make it easier for faculty to document where standards are taught and assessed, identify potential gaps earlier, and keep accreditation information current rather than rebuilding it when self-study preparation begins. 

In this 60-minute session, IU leaders Julie Bednarski, OTD, MHS, OTR, DipACLM, Clinical Associate Professor; OTD Program Director, Melinda Kurrus, Academic Fieldwork Coordinator & Clinical Assistant Professor, and Nicole Vicars, Administrative Coordinator alongside Stephanie Cuozzo, Vice President at CORE by PeopleGrove, will take attendees behind the scenes of fieldwork at IU Indianapolis. 

Melinda and Nicole will share the fieldwork workflows IU has established and where CORE has made coordination more manageable. Julie will then share why the program decided to change its approach to curriculum mapping and ACOTE preparation, how faculty are being brought into the process, and what the program is prioritized as it implemented CompMS. 

Attendees will leave with practical ideas for reducing manual coordination in fieldwork and building a curriculum-mapping process that provides greater visibility into alignment with ACOTE standards, engages faculty in maintaining accreditation evidence, and makes self-study preparation an ongoing process rather than a point-in-time exercise. 

Learning Objectives: 

• Identify strategies for using technology to coordinate fieldwork operations, including site availability, rotation scheduling, student evaluations, and partner communication, with the goal of reducing manual coordination and creating more consistent, accessible workflows across the fieldwork cycle. 

• Describe an approach to building and maintaining a curriculum map aligned to the ACOTE 2023 standards, including how the initial map can be built during implementation, how faculty are engaged to document where standards are taught and assessed, how curricular gaps are identified, and how the map is maintained to support ongoing accreditation readiness and future self-study preparation.