Master of Sports Medicine (MC-SPMED)

The Master of Sports Medicine is an online and interdisciplinary course, designed to produce graduates with extended knowledge and skills for professional practice in the area of clinical sports medicine. The curriculum is internationally relevant, fosters interdisciplinary communication and embraces the specialised requirements of different health professionals. It is designed for practicing clinicians as it can be studied part time or full time and has several exit points within its nested structure. It provides a pathway through a specialist certificate, graduate certificate and graduate diploma to a 150 credit point Master of Sports Medicine. Graduate attributes are aligned with those of The Melbourne Graduate; and further distinguished by established discipline-specific professional Masters level competency and standards frameworks in the domain of clinical sports medicine.

A clinical, interdisciplinary, wholly online Master of Sports Medicine mapped to accredited professional specialisation pathways is inherently innovative: three overlapping foundational pillars incorporated within learning, teaching and assessment tasks.

1. Student centred flexibility within and between subjects, where students are offered multiple choices within a structured framework to personalise and build their learning experience to best match their practice context and meet career goals.
2. Longitudinal development of a Sports Medicine Master Portfolio of multi-modal professional and community resources. This is envisaged to present tangible evidence of practice competency; learning and evidence applied to practice; and with its construct broadly defined by professional pathways towards recognised sport-specialist accreditation.
3. Cultivation of a Sports Medicine Master Community of practice which aligns the needs, demands, expertise and experience of the student cohort, sports and exercise community environments, tutor team, and clinical field experts. This will be characterised by online Master classes, synchronous tutorials, collaborative and independent activities, interactive videos and opportunity for direct interaction with real athletes and sporting organisations.

This approach is pedagogically robust and embraces the progressing international climate of flexible, sustainable, distance learning models. Assessment tasks can be completed at a distance and submitted electronically, encompassing a variety of written and presentation formats relevant to clinicians in demonstrating knowledge, clinical reasoning, communication and reflective skills in academic and practice contexts.

The Master of Sports Medicine pitches to professionals across degree-qualified clinical health disciplines, throughout career stages and internationally. In doing so, it pitches to post-graduates striving to achieve best practice professionally and clinically in Sports Medicine; embracing community health through working with athletes at all levels from recreational to elite, across the lifespan, inclusive of adolescent, adult and senior athletes. The program challenges and extends clinicians to anticipate, enhance and advance best practice internationally.

The curriculum is designed around three elements which will be covered explicitly within learning outcomes in each subject throughout the program: 1) Theory and Practice, 2) Evidence and Innovation and 3) Clinical Practice in Context. Linking theory, research and practice is emphasised, utilising scientific evidence to underpin clinical practice and decisions. The Master of Sports Medicine core subjects explore professional and clinical practice relating to sport and injury in diverse contexts including athlete physiology, biomechanics & performance; sports injury prevention, diagnosis & management and athlete case management. Alongside 8 core subjects (including a capstone subject), the course includes 3 elective subjects enabling students to scaffold their learning according to their interest areas and practice context. These subjects all require analysis, synthesis and creative problem solving within a range of practice contexts; extended knowledge and understanding, research principles and new innovations that are necessary to undertake sports medicine practice in different environments.

This course scaffolds students’ to strategically align their learning with established competencies to support their progress to Sports Medicine professional titles and / or ‘specialisation’ and to design their career for the local as well as international context. The Sports Medicine Professional Practice Capstone is needs-analysis led, facilitates a deep understanding of existing policy and process to design fully informed career goals, particularly focussed towards Sports professional titling and accreditation. An alternative Sports Medicine Research Capstone allows students to engage with a research team and more explicitly examine a sports relevant research question in some depth. These capstones strongly position students to devise a Sports Medicine Capstone experience to extend practice, research or scholarship and meet their goals. The capstone component is designed to demonstrate the application of knowledge and skills to: plan and execute a substantial research-based project, OR capstone experience OR piece of scholarship, in the area of sports medicine, ensuring that this program meets AQF level 9 requirements.