Research


 

Work with us to develop your ideas by researching new and innovative approaches to inform academic practice. The Digital Education Unit can support projects involving the use of digital technologies for teaching, learning and research, and will assist in the creation of pedagogically-driven ideas and solutions.

 

Current research projects and partnerships:

 

Through the patient’s eyes: using virtual reality and patient narratives to teach empathy to medical and nursing students – PTAS AWARD

Empathy is a fundamental attribute for healthcare professionals, yet worryingly, research suggests that empathy levels decline as students progress through their undergraduate education. This, in combination with evidence that empathy is a skill that can be taught, has resulted in recent interest in developing and delivering empathy teaching in undergraduate curricula. To address this locally, in 2018/9, we designed and ran workshops for medical and nursing students on empathy, communication and self-care. These workshops were situated in our interprofessional syllabus designed in recognition of the benefits of collaborative learning. Discussion during the empathy sessions revealed that students were unable to truly understand patients’ inner experiences – a key construct in the concept of empathy.

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology in medical education where it can be utilised to create an impression of clinical areas. We propose that by utilising VR to create clinical cases from a patient’s perspective, in combination with patient narratives and sensitive facilitated discussion, we can address this need for experiential learning.

In this project students will be stratified to receive standard empathy teaching or teaching using VR and patient narratives. Validated scales will be used to measure empathy in both groups pre and post session. Behavioural aspects will be assessed in a summative examination. Questionnaires and focus groups will be used to gather qualitative data on the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention, the overarching aim being to assess if our blended approach is an effective and acceptable means to improve healthcare students’ empathic abilities.

STATUS: ongoing

 

Interactive learning & teaching resources/scenarios developed by students for students in Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences

The aim of this project is to support students in taking ownership of developing bespoke resources for individual/peer learning with particular reference to the current situation in terms of a hybrid teaching model, covering three areas of the current learning and teaching provision: the undergraduate degree in Medicine (MBChB), Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences. Students will take ownership of creating their own teaching materials which is a pedagogically valuable activity to do as it helps students reflect on the content of their studies. The output will be shared with all their student cohorts and they will guide other students in doing the same.

STATUS: ongoing

 

Exploring the relationship between Learning Technologists and teaching staff a year on from the initial shift to hybrid and online teaching – PTAS AWARD

This project aims to better understand how the relationship between Learning Technologists (LT) and teaching staff working with learning technologies may have changed as a result of the shift to hybrid teaching over the past twelve months. We intend to collect findings from both teaching and learning technology staff at the College to explore this.

The first step is to design a questionnaire and semi structured interviews to be used, and to identify staff to invite to take part. The intention is to explore the views from LTs, to understand if they had any pre-expectations of the past twelve months, whether these were met, or not, or different, and also gather the views from teaching staff who have been supported by Learning Technologists. What were the existing relationships, have these evolved, have any new relationships emerged, what has gone well and what could be better for the future.

The aim is to understand how this relationship can continue and how it might look to evolve. Can we learn anything from the past twelve months to better improve the relationship in supporting the development of both the LT role, and the running of our portfolio of programmes to better the experiences for our students?

STATUS: ongoing

 

Improving the quality of assessment-feedback in postgraduate education; Co-creation of a digital training resource

Feedback is a fundamental component of student learning and development. However, students do not always perceive feedback as useful, describing it as low quality, lacking in detail and inconsistent. This is often in contrast with educators’ opinions.

Student feedback from CMVM postgraduate programmes mirrors this scenario, with students voicing dissatisfaction with assessment feedback received across different programmes.

UoE postgraduate and undergraduate medical programmes rely heavily on external experts to fulfil lecturer, clinical tutor and marker roles. External markers do not always have adequate pedagogical training or assessment literacy. This can result in sub-optimal feedback to students. Moreover, the feedback often fails to link to specific assessment criteria, failing to guide and support the development of relevant academic skills.

Although the educational literature offers reliable academic guidance on assessment feedback, guidelines often lack in conciseness and topic-specific examples, which are key for busy external markers.

To address the need for concise and targeted training to improve the quality of assessment feedback and therefore support students to thrive and fulfil their potential, three PG programme teams within the Deanery of Clinical Sciences will collaborate with the Medical School Digital Education Unit, and two postgraduate student advisors, to develop an interactive digital training resource (DTR). The effectiveness of the DTR will be assessed at both student and staff level, through surveys and semi-structured interviews.

Minor adaptation to the DTR, together with adequate CC licencing, will grant wider distribution and application for the DTR across programmes within the UoE and externally.

STATUS: ongoing