The Science of Education

Understanding & Compassion by Design

Understanding & Compassion by Design is a pedagogical-design course for healthcare educators. It teaches you to design curriculum that produces clinicians who can sustain compassion across a forty-year career: compassion as the trainable foundation, backward design as the structural method, multimedia learning as the delivery framework, and the CORE test as the final quality gate.

Dr. Russ L'HommeDieu, DPT

4 Modules

10 Sections

8 Contact Hours

Essential Understanding

The students who arrive in healthcare programs are not in a deficit of caring. They are in a surplus of it. What they lack is the specific, trainable skill set that allows that caring to sustain itself across a forty-year career rather than collapse into protective detachment within five. This course is about how to design for that.

Multi-Modal Learning Experience

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In-depth content with text-to-speech

Watch

Curated video content from experts

Listen

Podcast episodes and audio resources

Apply & Reflect

AI-coached practice and reflection

Course Outline

Module 1: Compassion as Foundation

Compassion is a trainable clinical skill, neurologically distinct from empathy, that can be developed through brief structured practice and protected by deliberate curriculum design. The students who burn out fastest are not the ones who care most; they are the ones who care in the wrong mode.

3 sections

The Compassion Crisis & The Distinction

Compassion Behaves Like a Muscle

Designing for Compassion: Architecture & Skills

Module Quiz Required to Progress

Module 2: Backward Design

Curriculum that produces transferable understanding is designed in three stages run in order: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, plan learning experiences. The discipline is what most planning skips.

3 sections

The Backward Design Mindset

Stage 1 & Stage 2: Results and Evidence

Stage 3: Plan Learning Experiences (WHERETO)

Module Quiz Required to Progress

Module 3: Multimedia Learning

Working memory is the bottleneck of learning. Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning names twelve principles across three families: reduce extraneous load, manage essential load, foster generative processing. Applied together, they predictably improve learning at no cost.

3 sections

CTML Foundations

Reducing Extraneous Processing

Managing Essential and Fostering Generative Processing

Module Quiz Required to Progress

Module 4: The CORE Test (Capstone)

Concise, Organized, Relevant, Engaging. Apply CORE as the final quality gate to whatever you build. If the artifact fails any gate, redesign before shipping.

1 section

The Four Gates and the Capstone Project

Module Quiz Required to Progress

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