In an era of rapid technological advancements, shifting student needs, and funding constraints, universities face increasing pressure to adapt their offerings to remain competitive and relevant. Amidst these challenges, Curriculum as a Service (CaaS) has emerged as a transformative approach to addressing program expansion and student retention.
Let’s explore what CaaS is, how it works, and why working with a provider like Tiber Health could be a game-changer for your institution.
CaaS is an innovative educational delivery model where external providers design, develop, and manage specialized academic programs, courses, or components in collaboration with universities. Think of it as outsourcing elements of your curriculum to trusted experts, ensuring high-quality, up-to-date, and scalable content without overburdening internal resources.
These services can include:
CaaS providers leverage expertise in instructional design, technology integration, and industry alignment to create engaging, outcomes-focused learning experiences.
CaaS has been slowly developing over the last 15 years, empowered by growth in cloud and mobile computing. A 2017 article in eSchool News offered a description of CaaS that still largely holds true eight years on:
“CaaS combines:
Traditional program development is often slow and resource intensive. With CaaS, institutions can rapidly roll out programs for in-demand fields (such as technology, healthcare, or data science) by partnering with providers who provide pre-designed, market-ready curricula. For universities looking to scale online or hybrid offerings, CaaS can also provide fully developed courses, freeing faculty to focus on student engagement and advising rather than content creation.
Working with a CaaS provider like Tiber Health also mitigates the risks of program expansion. That’s because we’ve conducted extensive research and refinement of our curriculum over the last 10 years to support better outcomes for students. In the case of our Master of Science in Medical Sciences (MSMS), we’ve seen hundreds of graduates achieve their goals. For example:
A 2024 survey about student retention by loan provider Sallie Mae looked into reasons why students left college without a credential. 42 percent of students cited motivation or life changes as an issue, while 26 percent said academic challenges drove them to leave. CaaS has the potential to support more personalized, engaging, and relevant education that helps students persist.
Our MSMS program, for instance, utilizes a flipped classroom model where students engage with course content online as well as in the classroom. Engagement statistics allow students to spend more time with concepts they’ve struggled to master and less time re-learning what they know.
Additionally, the cloud-based nature of CaaS means that when new standards or concepts arise, we can quickly push changes to the materials to keep them relevant. When students feel they’re progressing, receive personalized feedback, and see the latest ideas reflected in their courses, they’re more likely to be motivated to continue.
Another benefit of working with Tiber Health? Our proprietary, machine-learning driven student analytics suite helps your faculty members identify struggling students early and provide targeted interventions. Students can also access their USMLE Step 1 performance prediction, providing an additional motivator.
Partnering with any outside agency to deliver courses raises concerns. Key among these are issues of quality control, academic integrity, and cost management. In terms of quality control, our MSMS program aligns with the first year of pre-clinical courses taught at Ponce Health Sciences University, an LCME-accredited medical school. It’s designed to enhance your offerings, not take control of them. The goal is to allow you to retain ownership of your academic identity while leveraging our external expertise.
Finally, while there is an upfront cost, CaaS can lead to longer-term savings. Working with a CaaS provider, you can reduce internal development costs and offer high-demand programs that can lead to higher enrollments.
As competition intensifies, universities must innovate to remain relevant and attractive to students. Curriculum as a Service providers like Tiber Health offer a strategic pathway to expand program offerings, maintain content relevance, and improve student outcomes without overextending internal resources.
By embracing CaaS, your institution can deliver urgently needed education that meets the needs of today’s learners. It's not just a service—it's a partnership in shaping the future of education.
Interested in adding a technologically advanced pre-medical master’s degree program to your offerings? We can help. Contact Tiber Health today to learn how we can help you empower your students for success in medical and professional health careers.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down college campuses, higher education administrators accelerated their use of virtual learning technologies. As students returned to in-person learning, faculty and deans noticed that lecture attendance had dropped. This was especially true in medical schools, where, according to a 2023 article for NPR’s “Shots”, lecture attendance during the pre-clerkship years was usually low to begin with. Now that students had regular access to recordings of lectures, why turn up to class?
In-person education is still critical to educating clinicians, but today’s students clearly need something else. That something may just be the “flipped classroom,” formally described for the first time by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams in 2012. Implemented correctly, flipped classrooms can reignite student engagement and foster deeper learning. For university leaders, understanding and supporting this pedagogical transformation is vital to staying at the forefront of medical education.
In professional healthcare education, students must not only absorb vast amounts of knowledge but also apply it critically in dynamic environments. Traditional, lecture-based learning models don’t really support either of these goals. In “The Flipped Classroom: Abandon the Sage on the Stage, and Embrace the Guide on the Side,” an article for the American College of Surgeons’ journal Resources in Surgical Education, Dr. Catherine E. Lewis of UCLA cites evidence that students typically begin losing focus on a lecture after 10 minutes, and that most are only able to recall about 20 percent of material covered during that lecture immediately afterward.
The flipped classroom inverts this conventional teaching model. Instead of delivering foundational materials through in-class lectures that students passively consume, they’re instead provided to students before class in the form of videos, readings, or interactive modules. Class time is then repurposed for active learning activities, such as case-based discussions, group problem-solving, simulations, or hands-on practice.
Active learning lies at the heart of the flipped classroom. For example, a medical class might focus on diagnosing a simulated patient’s condition during class, leveraging prior study of pathophysiology from online videos and conventional texts. This approach moves students from passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in their education, challenging them to think critically and apply concepts in practice.
Flipped classrooms also promote the development of collaboration skills alongside clinical knowledge. Healthcare is inherently collaborative and problem focused. By incorporating team-based learning and problem-solving exercises, the flipped classroom helps students develop communication, leadership, and decision-making skills essential for interdisciplinary teamwork in their future careers.
Research shows that medical students who learn in flipped classrooms are actually more likely to demonstrate signs of deeper learning. A 2024 meta-analysis of 12 studies that examined flipped classrooms in clinical education, published online in Frontiers in Education, reported that students in flipped classrooms had better test scores and skill scores than students in traditional classrooms. A 2024 study in BMC Medical Educationthat focused on nursing students found that “that the flipped classroom model is conducive to improving learning outcomes and promoting the effective integration of theory and practice.”
As an added bonus? A 2019 study suggests that students who learn in flipped classrooms report increased satisfaction with their learning experiences compared to students in traditional lectures.
Flipping your classrooms, of course, isn’t simple, as a 2022 meta-analysis of 88 studies by Dutch researchers showed. Adopting the flipped classroom model may require investments in faculty training, technology, and curriculum redesign. Faculty need guidance on creating high-quality pre-class materials and facilitating in-class activities effectively. Furthermore, access to online platforms and simulation tools is essential to support this model.
However, these challenges are outweighed by the long-term benefits. In addition to evidence that learning outcomes are improved in flipped classrooms, supporting this learning model can send a clear message that your institution is committed to innovative, student-centered education. Moreover, this approach aligns with accreditation standards that emphasize competency-based learning and outcomes assessment.
At Tiber Health, we’ve helped implement flipped classroom learning for our Master of Science in Medical Sciences, a one-year pre-medical master’s degree curriculum. We’ve also found ways to build on the flipped classroom model’s reliance on technology to add even more value. In addition to utilizing a virtual learning environment for class pre-work, we also leverage our proprietary analytics platform to generate real-time insights into student performance.
These insights can be used to keep students motivated, inform faculty about where to intervene, and demonstrate to medical school admissions committees that our graduates are ready for the rigors of medical school. Now is the time to flip the script on traditional teaching and empower the next generation of healthcare professionals. If you’re interested in joining us as a university partner for the MSMS, contact Tiber Health today.
Healthcare disparities—differences in health outcomes driven by socioeconomic status, gender, race, or ethnic and cultural background—are one of the most pressing issues in U.S. and global healthcare. A 2024 report from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions estimates that, if left unaddressed, medical costs associated with health inequities could exceed $1 trillion by 2040.
Decades of research into health disparities have shown that a more diverse, culturally competent healthcare workforce leads to better care for patients from diverse backgrounds. A 2024 Associated Press article on healthcare workforce diversity quoted Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, as saying: “Inequities are baked into our health care system, and if we address them, everyone benefits.”
Improving the diversity of the healthcare workforce, therefore, is not just about meeting a moral imperative; it’s about improving the overall quality of healthcare. In a post-affirmative action world, one strategy for diversifying the healthcare workforce is the development and support of healthcare pipeline programs, such as the Tiber Health Master of Science in Medical Sciences (MSMS) complete digital curriculum.
Pipeline programs can play a transformative role in increasing medical school diversity by providing underrepresented and disadvantaged students with the tools, experiences, and confidence to pursue careers in medicine.
Pipeline programs are initiatives designed to guide students from diverse or underprivileged backgrounds into healthcare careers. These programs can target various stages of the educational journey, from middle school and high school to college and beyond. They often include:
Our MSMS curriculum falls into this fourth category. In 2023, a team of researchers from Tiber Health and Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU), led by Dr. Michael Mayrath, published a paper in Academic Medicine demonstrating how our pipeline program helped improve outcomes for students from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine.
Our paper described how we developed a one-year MSMS curriculum based on the first year of MD classes at PHSU, an LCME-accredited U.S. school of medicine. While many pre-medical special master’s programs take this approach, the PHSU program had one other feature: a predictive analytics model based on student performance data.
Our analytics model draws on student exam performance and categorizes their answers based on LCME standards, U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) systems and disciplines, and other criteria. The output of the model is the Tiber Performance Value (TPV), which estimates a student’s pass/fail result on the USMLE Step 1 compared to past PHSU medical school graduates. Our study looked at how well the TPV modeled actual achievement for MSMS students who went on to medical school.
In our study, we compared medical students who completed the MSMS pipeline program to students who were directly admitted to the PHSU MD program. The MSMS students had lower GPAs and MCAT scores, on average, when they entered the program: 3.46 GPA and 490.2 MCAT for pipeline students versus 3.68 GPA and 498.7 MCAT for directly admitted students.
However, once they were in medical school, the pipeline graduates achieved average USMLE Step 1 scores (as calculated before the pass-fail transition in 2022) comparable to the directly admitted MD students: 217.4 for MSMS grads, 217.8 for direct-admit MD students.
What’s more, our study showed that the TPV’s pass/fail value was a strong predictor of whether an MSMS student who moved on to medical school actually would succeed on the USMLE Step 1. (Fig. 3)
The predictive analytics data provided as part of our MSMS curriculum offers multiple benefits. First, it provides program faculty and staff with insights into student performance in real-time, allowing for early intervention that’s targeted to a student’s individual needs. Next, it provides students with motivational feedback that assures them they’re on track—or shows them where they need to improve to get back on track.
Finally, the TPV’s USMLE pass/fail prediction provides medical school admissions committees with a supplemental metric for evaluating a student’s potential for success—one that’s based on a longitudinal assessment, rather than a one-day exam performance such as the MCAT.
A diverse medical workforce is not just an ideal, it’s a necessity. The success of our innovative MSMS curriculum shows how universities can leverage predictive analytics to help empower underrepresented students who would make excellent physicians, leading to a healthcare workforce that meets every patient where they are.
Interested in learning more? Contact Tiber Health to find out how you can join our group of university partners.
Ponce Health Sciences University is Tiber's flagship university in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Within 18 months of implementing Tiber’s methodology & curriculum delivery platform, the school experienced a transformation. It went from a struggling university to a thriving example of success.
