In this extra post, Anna Pilz discusses her participation in the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PgCAP). Her assessment task for the option course on ‘Working with PGRs’ led her to develop a project for the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS) on ‘Co-Creating a New Development Needs Analysis for PGRs’ (January 2024-July 2025). Anna is an Academic Developer and Trainer in the Institute for Academic Development.

Soon after I had taken on a new role as Academic Developer at the Institute for Academic Development in autumn 2022, I enrolled on the PgCAP programme. I was motivated not only to gain professional accreditation via a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, but also to reflect on my teaching practice and pedagogical approaches within the context of my new role that involved designing and delivering training for postgraduate researchers and research staff across career stages.

One of my responsibilities in the role is to convene a three-week online course on “Getting Started with Postgraduate Research” for Master by Research and PhD students who are just at the beginning of their research degree journey. The PgCAP option course on ‘Working with PGRs’ therefore appealed to me. For the assessment, I chose to write a review report of the current use of Training Needs Analysis (TNA) at the University of Edinburgh to gain an understanding of current institutional practices within the context of sector-developments and scholarship on doctoral education.

Reviewing the use of Training Needs Analysis

One of the key elements of doctoral education is an emphasis on postgraduate researchers’ training and development. Within the Researcher Development Team, we had already identified the need to revisit the existing TNA. A TNA is a person-centred, reflective activity in form of a self-assessment, described by scholars as a key ‘pedagogical tool designed to assess doctoral researchers’ strengths as well as weaknesses’ (Elliot et al 2020, 149). Therefore, it is relevant right from the start and throughout the researcher degree journey by reflecting on strengths, development needs, intentions, and opportunities.

To understand current practices at Edinburgh and students’ experiences, I looked at the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) from 2023. Although satisfaction with supervision was at 86.5% at the University of Edinburgh in the 2023 Postgraduate Research Experience Survey, the question regarding the extent to which the ‘Supervisor helps identifying training’ reached the lowest satisfaction rate (76.3%) out of the four questions put to PGRs. The PRES survey highlights the need to involve both PGRs and supervisors in the process of engaging in training, development, and career conversations.

This is also reflected in wider sector conversations, including in UKRI’s Economic and Social Research Council’s 2022 review on “Strengthening the Role of Training Needs Analysis in Doctoral Training”, which signals supervisors’ crucial role in enabling effective use of TNAs as a tool. For any Training Needs Analysis, then, resources and training needs to be considered for supervisors, too. As Adams et al (2022) recommend, it’s important to ‘set clear expectations for supervisory input’ and offer ‘training to support supervisors in navigating DNA conversations’. This may involve addressing unconscious biases about career goals as well as emphasising that development needs ought to be integrated throughout and not only at the start or the end of a research degree journey. My review thus concluded that any revised TNA and associated processes and resources needs to engage and focus on both user groups: PGRS and supervisors.

Shifting to a Development Needs Analysis

Postgraduate research students arrive at the University of Edinburgh with their own personal set of skills and aptitudes, cultural attitudes to learning, understandings of the Higher Education and research landscape, professional experiences, and have a variety of career aspirations. Scholars have proposed the productive concept of a ‘doctoral learning ecology’, which is based on the understanding that ‘the doctoral journey takes place simultaneously within and across several domains of learning, namely, discipline, institution, workplace, and the person’s lifeworld.’ (Elliot et al 2020, 148)

The ‘doctoral learning ecology’ invites a wider conceptualisation of development than the term ‘Training Needs Analysis’ allows. My review thus followed UKRI’s ESRC recommendation to adopt the term Development Needs Analysis (DNA) (Adams et al 2022). A good DNA equips PGRs for whatever direction they want to take during and after their research degree. Successful engagement with a DNA – both through reflective self-assessment and through conversations with supervisor(s) – can affect a sense of control, ownership, and empowerment for their career trajectories.

From report to cross-university PTAS project

Having shared the report with Fiona Philippi, Head of Researcher Development at the IAD, and – on her suggestion – with the Doctoral College Forum, I started to develop an application to the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme. To improve PGRs’ satisfaction, enhance the student experience, and ensure the quality of doctoral education in line with sector developments, I wanted to co-create a new Development Needs Analysis for the University. With its wider professional and career emphasis, the new DNA would benefit from collaboration with the Careers Service, and Sharon Maguire (Assistant Director, Careers Service) was soon on board. To connect the DNA with institutional priorities, we also recruited Laura Bradley, Dean for Postgraduate Research in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Our new DNA must be applicable across disciplines. It’s been important to identify pilot communities that would allow us to test and evaluate the use of our new DNA by both students and supervisors. Tom MacGillivray, Co-Director of the Precision Medicine Doctoral Training Programme, and Kimberley Czajkowski, Graduate Officer in Classics in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, joined the project to pilot our DNA and resources in their respective contexts. With the team assembled, we drafted and submitted our PTAS application. The project was timely as it aligns with the University’s strategic priorities as set out in the 2024 Postgraduate Research Cultures Plan.

Following the successful outcome of the application, we recruited Majdouline El hichou, a PhD student in GeoSciences, as our Research Assistant. So, what all started as part of my own professional development, resulted in a project all about professional development, and created a professional development opportunity. You can read about how we established learning needs among both the PGR and supervisor communities, and why and how we co-created a draft of a new Development Needs Analysis in Maj’s blog, out next week.

References

Adams, Elizabeth, Scafell Coaching and Joanne Neary, Strengthening the Role of Training Needs Analysis in Doctoral Training (UKRI, Economic and Social Research Council, 2022). https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Strengthening-the-role-of-TNA-Report-April-2022.pdf.

Elliot, Dely L., Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Kay Guccione, and Sofie Kobayashi (2020), The Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral Education (Palgrave Macmillan).

The University of Edinburgh (2023), Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES).

Anna Pilz

Dr Anna Pilz (she/her) is an Academic Developer and Trainer in the Institute for Academic Development at Edinburgh. She designs and delivers training for researchers across career stages ranging from 1:1 support to online resources and workshops. As a first-generation academic, she is passionate about building communities and aims to enable, facilitate, and encourage conversations about research processes in all their shapes, sizes, and forms. She inaugurated and leads on the University’s Researcher Realities initiative.

In this extra post, Colette Revadillo, David Geddes, and Anya Tan showcase  APEX 7, an upcoming student-led medical research expedition to Bolivia that seeks to advance the field of high-altitude medicine. Colette, David and Anya are currently undergraduate Medical Students at the Edinburgh Medical School and are all part of the APEX Committee

What can medical students achieve during their time in medical school? It’s easy to assume that our journey is all about mastering anatomy, perfecting clinical skills, and keeping up with exams. But what if we could go beyond this? What if, during our time as students, we could lead international research expeditions, contribute to groundbreaking discoveries, and push the frontiers of global health—all while balancing our studies?

This is precisely what Altitude Physiology Expeditions (APEX), a Scottish charity founded by University of Edinburgh medical students, has made possible for over two decades. Established in 2001, APEX has organized six successful high-altitude research expeditions, with the seventh—APEX 7—scheduled for the summer of 2025. Each expedition is student-led, giving participants an unparalleled opportunity to engage in research, build leadership skills, and make tangible contributions to science while still in medical school.

APEX: A unique blend of education and innovation

The core mission of APEX is to study the effects of hypoxia—reduced oxygen levels at high altitudes—on the human body. While this may seem relevant only to mountaineers or elite athletes, hypoxia research has far-reaching applications in healthcare, especially for conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure. By understanding how the body adapts to low-oxygen environments, we can develop better treatments for patients suffering from oxygen deprivation.

What makes APEX truly exceptional is its commitment to student leadership. Medical students organise every aspect of the expeditions, from research design and fundraising to logistics and safety management. This level of responsibility gives us the chance to take what we learn in the classroom and apply it in a high-stakes, real-world setting.

APEX 7: The most ambitious expedition yet

APEX 7, planned for June and July 2025, promises to be the largest and most ambitious expedition in APEX’s history. With a team of 80 to 100 volunteers from the University of Edinburgh, we will travel to Bolivia, where we’ll spend 16 days conducting research at high altitudes. The journey will take us to La Paz (3,800 meters) for acclimatisation before moving to the Huayna Potosi Base Camp at 4,700 meters, where most of the research will occur.

One of the most exciting aspects of APEX 7 is its scale – it will be the largest controlled ascent ever conducted in medical research. The expedition is being led by eight senior medical students who previously participated in APEX 6. Balancing their academic commitments with the demanding task of organising this expedition, these students have been working for months to plan research projects, secure funding, and ensure the safety of all participants.

Among the student leaders are:

• Ben Harrison (Head of Funding, Grants, and Sponsorship)
• Ella McElnea (Head of Volunteers and Well-being)
• Cami Maezelle (Head of Funding, Grants, and Sponsorship)
• Anya Tan (Head of Research)
• Cameron Norton (Expedition Leader)
• David Geddes (Expedition Leader)

As part of this team, I can say firsthand that organising APEX 7 has been an incredible learning experience. We’ve gained skills in project management, teamwork, and research that go far beyond traditional medical training.

Research at high altitude: A hands-on learning experience

The heart of APEX lies in its research. Some of the exciting research projects planned for APEX 7 include:

• Gene expression at high altitude: This study will analyse how certain genetic variants regulate gene expression in response to hypoxia. By identifying these genetic markers, we can better understand why some individuals are more susceptible to altitude sickness or hypoxia-related conditions.
• Altitude and eczema: This project will explore whether high-altitude environments can alleviate symptoms of eczema, a condition often worsened by allergens and humidity. We will compare eczema severity in participants at different altitudes to see if there’s a correlation.
• Cortisol variation: Using a novel device to measure cortisol levels in the interstitial fluid over 24 hours, we will study how hypoxia affects the body’s stress response. Understanding this could lead to better management of stress in patients experiencing hypoxia.
• Cognitive performance under hypoxia: We will also assess how cognitive abilities are affected by altitude, testing participants at various points during the expedition to determine how decision-making and problem-solving skills are impacted by reduced oxygen levels.

These projects not only allow us to contribute to cutting-edge medical research but also give us hands-on experience of the scientific process—from study design and data collection to analysis and publication. It’s a rare opportunity to be directly involved in research that could have real-world medical applications, all while still in medical school.

What APEX teaches us: Lessons beyond the classroom

APEX is more than just a research expedition; it’s a powerful learning experience. Organising and leading an expedition of this scale requires skills that we don’t always develop in traditional medical education—leadership, problem-solving, and interdisciplinary collaboration. These are the kinds of skills that will serve us well throughout our medical careers, whether we pursue clinical practice, research, or other paths.

Being part of APEX also reminds us that medical school is about more than just learning from textbooks and lectures. It’s about exploring new areas of interest, taking on challenges, and pushing ourselves to make meaningful contributions to the field of medicine. Through initiatives like APEX, students have the chance to take ownership of their education and create opportunities that will shape their future careers.

Getting involved: A call to action

If you’re a student at the University of Edinburgh interested in medical research, global health, or expedition medicine, APEX is an unparalleled opportunity to get involved. Recruitment for APEX 7 volunteers will begin this autumn, with information sessions and workshops available for those who want to learn more. Whether you’re interested in scientific research, logistics, or volunteer coordination, there’s a role for you in APEX. Please email: apex7@altitude.org to register your interest!

In short, APEX 7 is a testament to what medical students can achieve when given the opportunity to lead, innovate, and explore. We’re not just learning medicine—we’re making discoveries that could change it. And that, I believe, is what makes APEX so special.

Read previous Teaching Matters blog posts on APEX expeditions:

• The APEX 5 Expedition: The Peak of Altitude Research
• APEX 6: Student-led learning in the Andes

Colette Revadillo

Colette is a 5th Year Medical Student, and Head of Communications of APEX 7.

David Geddes

David is a 4th Year Medical Student, and Expedition Leader of APEX 7.

Anya Tan

Anya is a 6th Year Medical Student, and Head of Research of APEX 7.

In this post, Dr Vassilis Galanos continues his exploration of metrics, its place in Higher Education, and the impact of the Research Excellence Framework on our work practices. This post is part 2 of 3, and belongs to the Hot Topic theme: Critical insights into contemporary issues in Higher Education.

In a previous post with Teaching Matters, I have written about how academic excellence evaluations such as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), claiming to measure research quality with some kind of objective precision, can foreground the development of digital machinery (such as Generative AI) that is adjustable to the REF’s objective (or better: objectifying) metrics. In this post, continuing the thread from part 1, I will connect the REF to the context of broader student and faculty numerical rankings. REF, that for many academics also stands for “Rigorously Established Fear”, often ends up fostering a competitive environment where volume trumps substance and impact is staged in wording but often not grounded in practice. As an example of this, as part of the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Data Civics Observatory, I encountered the frustration of local communities in Edinburgh who complained about researchers using their underdeveloped neighbourhoods to justify their grant allocation, but disappeared upon the project’s end.

Niche or curiosity-driven disciplinary-questioning endeavours get side-lined while churned-out, quota-meeting research takes centre stage, especially in the context of academic-industry collaboration. Such collaboration is initially phrased as an attempt to open-up the world of Academia into the real world, but, in practice, it transforms Academia itself into a peculiar type of industry. This mirrors the rise of performance indicators in corporate bureaucracies, which seek to optimise efficiency at the expense of innovation and creativity.

This obsession with optimisation and efficiency further increases the distance between metric-driven reporting as just a symbol and as practical social change (as Matthew Archer recently showed in his 2024 book ‘Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability,’ or, as Stanislav Andreski beautifully put it in 1970, “evasion in the guise of objectivity”; “quantification as camouflage’; and ‘techno-totemism and creeping crypto-totalitarianism”).

As an individual progresses up the academic ladder from student to staff, the REF exercise takes the emotional place occupied by the marker’s assessment and staff mentor’s supervision as the higher and sufficiently invisible entity of surveillance. This mirrors Marx’s description of a factory, which, in our case, is the university (my additions in square brackets):

“The technical subordination of the workman [read: worker, but also student, lecturer, professor, etc] to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour [including marking schemes, impact assessments, article production, grant allocation mechanisms], and the peculiar composition of the body of workpeople, consisting as it does of individuals of both sexes and of all ages, give rise to a barrack discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory [and academia], and which fully develops the before mentioned labour of overlooking, thereby dividing the workpeople into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and sergeants of an industrial army. […] The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s book of penalties [including late submission penalties, resits, redundancy of academics who did not produce REFable outcomes, and more]” (Marx 2013: 293).

In the next, and final, post of this three-part series, I will conclude this conversation by situating the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) within the afore-described process of metrics-oriented culture.

Vasileios Galanos

Dr Vassilis Galanos, SFHEA is a visitor at the Edinburgh College of Art and works as Lecturer in Digital Work at the University of Stirling. Vassilis investigates historico-sociological underpinnings of AI and internet technologies, and how expertise and expectations are negotiated in these domains. Recent collaborations involved the history of AI at Edinburgh, interrogations of generative AI in journalism (BRAID UK), artist-data scientist interactions (The New Real), and community-led regeneration interfacing with data-driven innovation (Data Civics). Vassilis has co-founded the AI Ethics & Society research group and the History and Philosophy of Computing’s (HaPoC) Working Group on Data Sharing, also acting as Associate Editor of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.

In this post, Dr Vassilis Galanos dissects what metrics really mean for students, educators, and researchers in the wider academy. This post is part 1 of 3, and belongs to the Hot Topic theme: Critical insights into contemporary issues in Higher Education.

As the heading suggests, it’s not some Matrix-like virtual reality conspiracy controlling all things academic – it’s the metrics. For about 20 years now, from undergraduate student to Lecturer, I’ve experienced numbers like student grades, attendance monitoring points, seminar participation marks, journal rankings, research excellence frameworks (REF), and citation scores as structural elements we increasingly have to face, understand, and be assessed against. Yet, at the same time, we find ourselves being less outspoken about these metrics and what they mean for our daily lives.

Following a long legacy of bureaucratic solutionism, they’re supposed to streamline and improve academic management and recognition, but often end-up reducing the – supposedly – rich, varied experience of academia to a dry set of spreadsheets, impact factor badges, and transcript competitions.

As a person who studies the history of the internet in parallel with artificial intelligence (AI) (and an avid social media user myself, turning my life into an open experiment), I’ve seen the rise of social media metrics like ‘likes’, ‘follows’, and ‘faves’ being established as a “free-for-all” venue for numerical recognition. I have also seen how they further normalise our obsession with numbers, converging with the proliferation of AI and algorithmic technologies to amplify and entrench this metric-driven culture. When you add Generative AI into the mix, the metrics game shifts into hyper-drive with an efficiency that an Orwell-Huxley hybrid couldn’t have predicted.

For the past six months, I’ve spent time with Karl Marx’s The Capital, volume 1, so I decided to dissect what these metrics really mean, using insights from surveillance studies, Marxian economics, and the quantified self, with a nod to the history of numerical classifications from mathematics to economics. To complete the pun: from the Matrix, to metrics, to Marx.

Grades as assessment

Grades are the old standby for assessing students, neatly categorising their efforts and even identities into A, B, C, and “better luck next time.” Or, to use a term co-constructed by Hélène Cixous (1975, 1994: 29) and Jacques Derrida (1979: 97), they encapsulate the education of a phallogocentric system – one that is at the same time serving a masculine (phallocentric) ideal of military rankings and the dominion of rationality (reasoned logic as Logos, that is, logocentric). This creates a linear trajectory in which there is less space for winners and those in higher ranks.

Grading turns the wonderfully messy process of learning into bite-sized numbers, much like fast food turns diverse cuisines into generic meals – always with the opportunity to pay a bit more in order to have access to luxurious gastronomy. This simplification often strangles creativity and critical thinking. For the imaginative and divergent thinkers, it’s like being shoved into a production line where only uniformity gets rewarded.

The politics of such numerical simplification finds its roots back to the early applications of mathematics in standardising measurements for trade and commerce as well as military precision. Here’s Marx:

“The division of labour, as carried out in Manufacture, not only simplifies and multiplies the qualitatively different parts of the social collective labourer, but also creates a fixed mathematical relation or ratio which regulates the quantitative extent of those parts […]. It develops, along with the qualitative sub-division of the social labour-process, a quantitative rule and proportionality for that process” (Marx 2013: 241).

The presentation of presence

Attendance records act as the school’s hall monitor, ensuring students physically show up. Digital systems like biometric scans offer precise tracking but also inch dangerously close to a Big Brother type of oversight. This constant scrutiny is more than just checking who’s present – it’s a subtle method of enforcing compliance and cultivating a culture of stress and control. The evolution of such monitoring systems can be linked to the development of bureaucratic systems in the 19th century, which relied on statistical data to manage and control populations. Interestingly, this enforcement of being present in fear that attendance is being monitored, is transformed within social media environments into “fear of missing out” (FOMO).

The presentation of presence as something to compete for is an interesting parallel between (a) attendance monitoring as part of one’s entertainment/leisure lifestyle, and (b) the joy of education as an enforced evil that is effected only by attendance supervision. Marx again:

“An industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requires, like a real army, officers (managers), and sergeants (foremen, overlookers), who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function” (Marx 2013: 230

(Keep in mind that the French word “surveillance” literally translates into “supervision” or “overseeing” – worth considering every time you have a “supervision meeting” with your dissertation supervisor or your line manager).

The power of citations

For faculty, journal rankings and citation metrics are the currency of the academic marketplace (as it is very precisely put in everyday vocabularies). Top-tier publications and a heap of citations bring career benefits like tenure and grants. But navigating this numbers game often means playing it safe, avoiding the unconventional or interdisciplinary work that might not score high on the metrics scale. This focus on numeric evaluation echoes the econometric models that gained prominence in the 20th century, emphasising quantifiable data over qualitative insights. As an extension of econometrics, the 20th century saw the evolution of bibliometrics, scientometrics, and infometrics, as a quantifiable measure of impact of research.

Compounding the issue, social media metrics like ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ further normalise academics’ predisposition towards popular, mainstream topics that satisfy the instantaneity of a present-oriented appreciation of science. This is often at the expense of deeper, more substantive inquiries, which extend into the past and future. Indeed, the academic culture behind creating ‘tweetable’ abstracts of abstracts (“threads”) after an attention-grabbing title that is meant to be retweeted indicates the time pressure under which scholarly content is produced, disseminated, and consumed – “content” in the recent social media flavour of the word.

In the next part of this Teaching Matters contribution, I will relate the question concerning metrics to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise.

Vasileios Galanos

Dr Vassilis Galanos, SFHEA is a visitor at the Edinburgh College of Art and works as Lecturer in Digital Work at the University of Stirling. Vassilis investigates historico-sociological underpinnings of AI and internet technologies, and how expertise and expectations are negotiated in these domains. Recent collaborations involved the history of AI at Edinburgh, interrogations of generative AI in journalism (BRAID UK), artist-data scientist interactions (The New Real), and community-led regeneration interfacing with data-driven innovation (Data Civics). Vassilis has co-founded the AI Ethics & Society research group and the History and Philosophy of Computing’s (HaPoC) Working Group on Data Sharing, also acting as Associate Editor of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.