Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
As lockdowns during the pandemic begin to ease, and we can spend time outdoors with our family and friends, it was fabulous to hear from Katie Wells, the National Coordinator for the PREVENT Dementia Programme.
During the webinar, Katie discussed her role in managing multiple study sites across 3 nations during the Covid19 pandemic. She describes how the research has been impacted by the pandemic, focussing on the different restrictions in place in the different sites across the UK and Ireland as she and her teams worked to bring back the healthy volunteer research.
Stephanie (Charlie) Farley, Open Education Resources (OER) Advisor within Education Design and Engagement was curating a mini-series of posts on the Teaching Matters blog to celebrate 5 years of the Open Education Resources service.
Last week marked one year mark since the first pandemic lockdown started and many of us took part in the one minute’s silence held on 23rd March to pay our sympathies and respects to the more than 126,000 individuals who have been lost to our communities. Looking forward, there is a sense of optimism on the horizon now that the vaccination programmes are being rolled out with huge success. Our healthcare teams around the country have risen to an unprecedented challenge and made massive contributions in response of the pandemic.
Our staff are still making fantastic efforts to deliver the best in health and social care research despite challenging circumstances, and our University colleagues continue to deliver education to the student body.
With pride we can reflect on how our researchers are leading work on disease susceptibility, treatments, the effectiveness of vaccines and other critical clinical aspects. Having been well supported by regulatory, funding and R&D teams.
Many personal and professional battles have been fought during the challenges of the past year and these make all of the achievements attained even more remarkable. Well done, we’re doing it. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and as the spring months extend into summer we can hopefully get back to enjoying what we did before.
For us this will be maintaining a sense of community and support for our clinical research teams, delivering training and education in both online and face-2-face formats and continuing to improve our learning and development offering so that we can respond to these types of events together.
Webinar 8 brings us an update from Elizabeth Craig, Senior Clinical Trials Monitor in ACCORD. Here she discusses Monitoring during a Pandemic and if you maintain Sponsor oversight without leaving home?
Taking us through the events of last year, Liz reflects on how the pandemic has impacted her team and the service they provide. She will present some of the 2020 metrics along with what they have developed process wise to continue risk based monitoring remotely across the portfolio.
Liz will pay particular attention to the pros and cons and highlight some of the processes the team will actually keep in place post pandemic because there are definitely some changes which will stick around long term.
One year ago this week, experts at the Western General Hospital’s Regional Infectious Diseases Unit (RIDU) became the first to care for a patient who had tested positive for COVID-19 in Scotland. ‘They were certain that “life as we knew it would change” in the instant they received the emergency call’, they weren’t wrong!
Together we unite
Fast forward to February 2021, and Professor Stuart Ralston joins us for the Research during a Pandemic webinar series where he talks about his role as Chair of the Commission for Human Medicines, and how we have got to where we are with the Covid-19 vaccines as well as what he anticipates in the future.
The ERO experts also provide a heap of resources and support to help you navigate through this and make the experience as painless as possible including (these links were relevant to this webinar in Jan 2021):
Webinar 5 at the end of 2020 was with Dr Steve McSwiggan and Miranda Odam. Both very experienced senior research nurse managers who have been at the fore front of the clinical staff response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this session, ‘Doing the best we can‘ they discuss the work of clinical research staff during the COVID 19 pandemic. Looking at the work done with the initial Covid Research Group as an example of forward and adaptable planning, the pressure of screening and recruiting to UPH badged projects, and the clinical pull of staff including the reprioritisation of research and it’s visibility.
It’s great to be back after a restful break and to bring you the last webinar of 2020 in our “Research during a Pandemic’ Series which came from Dr Alex Bailey of the MRC Regulatory Support Centre.
Alex spent a fabulous session highlighting to us that there are silver linings in these dark times of Covid, especially for research. One of these linings is how the expedited processes that have come in for Covid have speeded things up.
Silver linings
Will all of these things stay in place? How much will depend on the severity of the 3rd wave. And what can we expect from the vaccine research? Click in to find out 😉
Continuing on from his earlier blog, Shawn Soh builds upon his experiences in both online and face2face learning environments.
I recently attended a course on “Writing a data management plan” which was conducted online on 19th November 2020. Prior to this, I had also attended two other courses: “Stats for the terrified” and “A realistic introduction of R”. The courses were held online in response to the COVID-19 situation. In some way, I am fortunate that ECRF has made efforts to conduct the courses online. As I am away from Edinburgh doing my data collection, it would not have been possible for me to attend the courses physically at WGH. I was asked by the administrator ‘why I had signed up for these online courses?’. Besides gaining new knowledge, I must admit that the courses fees were more affordable for me, as a student, to attend. Further, the easy accessibility and convenience of attending the online course was the main reason for me.
Attending the online courses with WCRF was seamless. A link to the course session would be provided via email a few days before the course day. Then, Ta-dah! Students would usually appear on the online platform 5-10 min before the lesson begins. What a breeze to attend (with a cup of nicely prepared roasted coffee placed on my study table). In the recent course, when I joined in fifteen minutes earlier, there were no students in the online platform except the administrator and the course tutor. I took the opportunity to have a wonderful conversation with them while waiting for the other students to join in.
Similar to physical-based sessions, the courses conducted by ECRF were well-received. Each session would usually have about 15 to 20 students, depending on the course’s objectives and the comfort of the tutor to manage the group. Given the nature of online teaching, I found that the skill of the course tutor to facilitate the session would be paramount. If the courses were generally highly content-driven, the information would be seamlessly delivered as a form of didactic teaching. However, when courses were more practical driven, e.g. requiring the practice of skills, then the delivery may be more challenging to be conducted online. For example, the learning of the use of R had needed more hand-hold guidance of the tutor to help less technologically-savvy individuals and those who were unfamiliar with the programming language. Perhaps, one way to circumvent the issue would be to have more facilitators and the use of break-out rooms. Other challenges, such as the lack of students’ participation or inadequate group participation might also arise. Students would not be able to see each other, given that the option that the video may be switched off. Consequently, course tutors would not be able to see the responses of students and make the necessary judgement whether the course delivery had been paced appropriately. The lack of visual inputs restricts interactions among course tutors and students. One possible approach would be that the course tutor might request students to switch on their videos. However, such request might possibly affect bandwidth usage, which in turn cause video lags, affecting the learning experience.
Nevertheless, I had enjoyed my online training sessions with ECRF. The course tutors checked in with the students verbally or through the chat box to ascertain whether students had any issues with the delivered information. Vibrant and positively-vibe conversations were held through the meeting chat panel between the course tutors, course administrators and students.
For centuries, knowledge has been traditionally transferred from a teacher to a student in a place-based classroom method. One challenge emerged through this mode of knowledge delivery. What happens when the student is unable to be physically present in the classroom? For example, even though I was keen to attend the lesson, but I would be unable to attend physical-based lessons as I was not in Edinburgh. Should learning be stopped if the student is unable to be physically present in school? Does learning need to be restricted by geographical locations? In today’s modern world abuzz with technological advancements, what ways can the students’ learning be enhanced and enriched?
There is no doubt that the internet has decolonised learning in the educational field. Today, everyone can seek (or share) any kind of answers using popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo. The wealth of knowledge can incredibly be acquired at any time, at any place at the snap of my fingers (think “Ask Google…”). However, learning through the internet may not necessarily obliviate the need of teachers, or that “Mr Google” should be the Omni-teacher. It may be argued that there is a greater need for more course tutors to adequately guide the student to distil and discern knowledge through a critical, yet inclusive manner. Students do need some degree of guidance on what knowledge would be meaningful to them in an increasingly VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world. Skills such as critical thinking, ethical reasoning and moral agency cannot be easily taught through the internet, and such appreciation of knowledge should be guided through wise educators. I have no doubt that various elements of respect, professionalism and encouragement of participation, inclusion and emancipation could still be illuminated in the online space.
Some pros of online space
Ease and convenience of attendance
Lower course fees
Accessibility to global course tutors and audience
Some cons of online space
Lesser feedback, e.g. body language obtained from course tutors and students
Need to have greater awareness on pacing the session accordingly based on verbal or written cues
Need for logistic planning, e.g. synchronising breakup rooms and online quizzes
Require a basic comfort of the use of technology
Decolonizing learning helps us to recognize, understand, and challenge the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism. It also prompts us to examine our professional practices. It is an approach that includes indigenous knowledge and ways of learning, enabling students to explore themselves and their values and to define success on their own terms.
The time is right for us to review the decolonisation of the curriculum, even in the practice of various modes of course delivery. In critically re-examining our approach of teaching and learning, education would be transformative, not just for the student, but for the educational institution and the course tutors. It would not be an easy transition, but it is long overdue and must be addressed to advance our educational practices. Perhaps, we might also consider that physical-based learning or online learning might not need to be a binary option, but the choices that could complementary (blended teaching) or offered simultaneously (to allow better accessibility). Nevertheless, whatever the teaching pedagogy selected, online teaching and learning will be part of mainstream education in this present time and age. If educational institutions resist the use of online teaching, other online learning resources would still be readily available to the students through the internet. To prepare the student for the future, educational organisations need to be forerunners, to decolonise the curriculum and to explore different pedagogy. The adoption of forward-looking educational culture would nurture the learners for them to flourish through the provision of diverse teaching and learning methods.
This week we have a the first part of a super guest blog from one of our students, Shawn Soh. Shawn highlights his experiences attending ECRF Education Programme courses in both an online and face2face capacity.
The review of curriculum for teaching and learning has always been done within organisations for its objectives, relevance, and the need to keep abreast with best current practices. Depending on the agenda, decolonising the curriculum is one perspective which may be brought alongside the review.
The idea of decolonisation of higher education started two decades ago as a movement to ensure that the knowledge and practices of indigenous people were represented in the higher education curricula of post-colonial countries. Recently, the concept of a decolonised curriculum has been raised amongst educational institutions to emphasise an inclusive curriculum that considers the broader diversity of all learners. Decolonisation of the curriculum challenges our assumptions of knowledge and the ways of teaching and learning. Through an approach of embracing the diversity of knowledge, the different epistemology towards learning, and the provision of learning resources, the student may embark on a rewarding self-discovery journey of exploring and defining success by themselves in their own ways. In this context, I will discuss decolonising the classroom through my personal experience with the different delivery modes of training courses offered by Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility (ECRF) for my flourishment of academic learning.
I still vividly remember my first training course held at the ECRF, Western General Hospital (WGH) on 29th May 2019. The course was “Planning and conducting a systematic review: From quality appraisal to publication (Part 2)”. The training came timely for me as I was a first-year PhD candidate and needed to inaugurate my PhD journey with a systematic review. When I first heard about the course I rushed excitedly to sign up. You may wonder why I had only signed up for Part 2. Well, as a student, I had to be price-conscious and needed to be selective on the courses to attend..
The course was well-attended with about twenty participants. I remembered feeling slightly out of place, given that I was only attending the second part of the course. The group of students appeared to know each other, perhaps from the early interactions during the first part of the course. However, the momentarily discomfort dissipated when I was warmly received by the staff and the course tutors. I was also glad to meet three of my PhD classmates.
The course was well-planned and well-conducted. The course tutors took no assumption of the current knowledge of the students. They paced the teaching according to the feedback received from the students. The session catered well to the different levels of students’ knowledge. Many students were keen to learn about the planning and to conduct the systematic review, with a view of an eventual publication. The course tutors were supportive and attempted to clarify any doubts that the students may have. Students also had the opportunity to give their opinions on various subjects. There was no sense of power imbalance between the tutors and students. Each concern raised by the students was respectfully answered. There was no sense that one needed to have the lingua franca to articulate their concerns. I felt that the message brought across the classroom was that “we endeavour to help you succeed”.
The course was useful for those who were doing systematic review through a form of the Cochrane Review. Unfortunately, I later discovered that I had to use the COSMIN (COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instruments) method for my systematic review. Nevertheless, I found the course well delivered and met its course’s aims and objectives.
Decolonising learning helps students to recognise, understand, and challenge the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism. It also prompts us to examine our professional practices. Through my learning in the physical-based space interaction, I was able to witness the interactions between course tutors and students. Learning through the physical space allowed diverse learners (their voices, background, gender, different level of knowledge, etc.) to come together and transform the learning practice. I greatly appreciated the various elements of respect, professionalism and encouragement of participation, inclusion and emancipation illuminated in the course.
Some pros of physical space
Physical interaction between course tutors and students
Ability to pace the session accordingly based on verbal and non-verbal cues
Ease and accessibility of hand-hold guidance offered by course tutors
