Category: Student

Student Information Management Programme update

Invitation to attend a SIMP update for all Faculty of Medicine Staff

The Student Information Management Programme (SIMP) is a multi-year phased programme to implement a College-wide student information system that is underpinned by processes to support academic and student administration.

For students, this will ensure a consistently excellent experience when using College systems, irrespective of stage in the student lifecycle, year or programme of study.

For staff, this will ensure visibility of a modular level student study view in-year and in real-time to make decisions based on high quality and comprehensive information.

The new Banner system will reflect the College’s infrastructure, its programme and modular curriculum structure, its regulations and student activity to improve information sharing for both staff and students. A key aim is to establish the system as the single source of truth for student and curriculum data, providing a foundation for all information systems involving student data.

The transition to fully using Banner as a College-wide system will bring about changes in the way that student and curricula data is held, viewed and managed. Understanding the extent of reliance on local systems to manage data processing is key to successfully embedding the change to achieve a single source of truth.

SIMP Department Roadshows

To foster understanding and commitment for the planned phased outcomes you are invited to attend a SIMP Department Roadshows which has been arranged by the Faculty of Medicine for all staff.

The roadshows will give you an opportunity to meet with the Programme Sponsor, the SIMP Business Team and FoM Leadership and these events aim to provide an opportunity to update you on the programme and invite discussion on:

  1. Sponsorship for the vision, phased outcomes and benefits
  2. Objectives, timing and highlights of each of the multi-year phases
  3. Looking-back over 2019 in preparation for phase I go-live (January 2020)
  4. Looking-forward to achieving a successful phase II (January – September 2020).

Upcoming sessions

Three sessions have been arranged, at St Mary’s, South Kensington and Charing Cross Campuses.  The South Kensington session will be recorded for those staff unable to attend in person.

Date Time Campus Room options & capacity Comments
8 November 14.30 – 15.30 St Mary’s 65A&B
18 November 15.00 – 16.00 South Kensington SAFB 119 This session will be recorded.
27 November 15.00 – 17.00 Charing Cross CXRB R2&R3 booked

 

The view of an old St Mary’s man

Professor Peter Sever reflects on his time studying and working at St Mary’s Campus and looks forward to the new vision for the Faculty of Medicine.


I spent three wonderful years as a student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School and have spent most of my professional life on the Mary’s Campus. Initially in the old Medical Unit with Sir Stanley Peart on the third floor of the Medical School, moving to the top floor of the QEQM building when it opened in 1987, then to offices in North Wharf Road. Finally, when they bulldozed down the North Wharf buildings, I was resettled in splendid new accommodation at the Hammersmith Hospital, in the Imperial College Translational and Experimental Medicine Building.

As one of the oldest Mary’s men still working, it came as a culture shock after so many years at Mary’s to decamp to the heart of the Hammersmith – an institution with which, for so many years in the past, we competed fiercely!

The move has been a great success and I realised that it’s people, not buildings that are important in the modern world. Bringing together clinicians and researchers, working together in their different disciplines, in new purpose-built accommodation, that provides them with the best opportunity to carry out their scientific programmes and look after their patients, is a goal to which we should aspire.

One of the problems I have experienced over many years has been the fragmentation of clinicians and scientists working across several campuses in a far from efficient way, when consolidation of our enormous talents on single sites would have benefited all. If we are going deliver the best research and the best patient care we must look hard at the geography of our institutions and plan for the optimal way in which we can achieve our goals. (more…)

Postgraduate opportunity: student representative for Research Ethics Committee

Calling all postgrads!

Imperial College London would like to recruit a postgraduate student representative for the NEW Science, Engineering and Technology Research Ethics Committee (SETREC). SETREC will focus on non-health related projects and will run alongside the ICREC which previously had oversight for all health and non-health studies.

A key aim of the Committee is to enable Imperial to maintain the highest ethical standards in all research relating to human participants.

SETREC will convene monthly on the third Tuesday of each month at South Kensington Campus. If you are interested in joining the Committee, please send a short letter outlining relevant experience and suitability. Please include an up to date copy of your CV.

No experience necessary. Applications must be sent to Nooreen Shaikh at the Joint Research Compliance Office. Information on ICREC can be found on the website.

Closing Date: 28 February 2019

Faculty of Medicine’s new Attributes and Aspirations Module – what is it?

Dallas Alexandrou, project manager for the Attributes and Aspirations module explains this new module:

In parallel to the ongoing curriculum review, the Faculty of Medicine postgraduate team has identified the need to develop high-quality tools and activities to help our Master’s students take ownership of their professional futures and develop their graduate attributes beyond the mastery of their chosen discipline.

As a result, the proposed Attributes and Aspirations (AA) module has been approved by the College Pedagogy Transformation Committee and is currently being developed. It will use interactive pedagogical activities based on a blended, inclusive, innovative and active approach to supporting our students.

Critical to the development of the AA module is that it meets both students’ and employers’ needs. Research has been undertaken to identify the relevant topics and skills our students are keen to develop, together with the skills and attributes identified by employers as being critical graduate skills for current and future employment. Areas including effective career guidance, practice of selection processes and skills such as adaptability, communication, critical thinking, problem solving and effective team work have been identified as priorities.

Subject to the College’s standard approval mechanisms, a pilot delivery of the AA module will commence from Autumn Term 2019-20 in selected Faculty of Medicine MSc/MRes programmes. AA will be non-credit bearing and elective, with much of the delivery online to avoid interfering with students’ timetabled teaching and lab sessions.  Following evaluation of the pilot, there is an ambition to offer the module to students from all FoM postgraduate programmes and to students from Faculties across the College. (more…)

NeurOn Topic – a new Imperial blog

A new Imperial blog entitled ‘NeurOn Topic: Learning and Teaching’ has launched this week.

The founder and editor of the blog is Dr Stefano Sandrone, Teaching Fellow within the Faculty of Medicine, and the contributors are Imperial’s MSc Translational Neuroscience students.

The key aims of this new blog are to enhance the curriculum, innovate pedagogy and inspire society.

With questions submitted by current Master’s students, the first blog post features an interview with Dr Magdalena Skipper, former Imperial alumna and new Editor-in-Chief of Nature. She is the first female Editor-in-Chief over the last 149 years and started her new role at the beginning of July.

Some of the topics that will be covered in future blog posts include the relationship between brain science and spirituality, the neuroscience behind the ‘perfect’ morning cup of coffee, and the neuroscience of revision. There will be also space for notes on the cognitive changes in depression and on the neurological aspect of HIV, as well as on the important role the anterior part of our brain plays in learning and cognition.

Furthermore, other interviews with special guests have already been planned.

Stay tuned! Visit the blog at: https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/neuron-topic/

Faculty Education Office staff fundraising for charity supported through new MBBS module

A team from Medicine’s Faculty Education Office are raising money for the charity Days for Girls, supporting a team of MBBS students heading out to rural Nepal in May.

In 2016, the School of Medicine collaborated with the ICSM Students’ Union and charity Community Action Nepal, to produce ‘Imperial College Enables’, giving students the opportunity to experience healthcare systems entirely different to that of the UK.

The project grew in 2017, and from the work the students did on their visit to Nepal came a relationship with the charity Days for Girls, which supports young women around the world by distributing female hygiene kits and education materials about menstruation.

Many women in rural Nepal struggle to manage their periods, some using rags and many forced to stay indoors for the duration, and the level of education about menstruation is low.

During the students’ visit, word spread quickly between the rural communities, and many women walked many miles to a health post to collect a hygiene kit. The students soon ran out of the kits, which are colourful bags containing washable sanitary pads and underwear.

Each kit can last up to three years, and costs just £5.14 to produce. The kits are also sewn and put together in Nepal, offering the extra benefit of employment for local people.

In May 2018, students will return to the Nepalese health posts previously visited, as part of a new second-year MBBS module, Clinical Research and Innovation. The aim is to prepare these students with 1033 hygiene kits – the number of female students currently in the School of Medicine.

The FEO team spearheading the fundraising initiative alongside Head of MBBS Years 1 and 2, Professor Mary Morrell, are Jo Williams and Margaret Rodger, Programme Officers for MBBS Years 1 and 2; Hannah Pietruszewska, Education and Finance Officer; Labbie Farrell, Programme Assistant for MBBS Years 1 and 2; Emma Blyth, Instructional Designer; and Agata Sadza, Blended Learning Specialist. (more…)

IMPLEMnT: Teaching, technology and community

What is IMPLEMnT?

Last year James Moss and I (Katie Stripe) of the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) and Alexandra ‘Chippy’ Compton, medical student and ICU president, received a grant from the Excellence Fund in Learning and Teaching Innovation to develop a tool that will help educators navigate their way through today’s technology-saturated world in order to more effectively use digital methods in their teaching. Ultimately we hope to create a tool that will help anyone in a teaching role, be that a lecturer, a doctor teaching at the bedside, a lab demonstrator, or any one of the huge variety of educators we have in the faculty and across college, to make informed decisions about which technologies are most appropriate for the type of teaching they are providing. There are many sites listing the myriad technologies that can be used in learning but none, so far, that have combined that information with teaching methodology to give practical advice on what to use and when.

Embarking on this project we rather naively thought it would be simple to curate a list of technologies and teaching methodologies then join them together. We were wrong, very wrong! Once we began looking at the technology used in teaching it became clear that there an overwhelming number so we hope to make this into a college-wide community project by asking colleagues and student partners which technologies they use and how. We can then build a bank of technologies that grows dynamically as technology develops but is also relevant to our teaching community.

We have already constructed a framework at implemntproject.com where we have so far compiled a small number of technologies, however, we have a list of over 300 more unfinished plus the thousands that we have not yet encountered. Since IMPLEMnT aims to be a tool that works for people from across college it seems fitting that those teachers should be able to contribute. If you have ideas or suggestions you can contact us through the site, via twitter @implemntproject or you can join us for a mass online co-authoring session on 25 April at 12pm. This event will have two face-to-face sessions running at the South Kensington campus where staff can come together and contribute technologies, methodologies and case studies via post-it notes, marker pens and other more traditional means, and running alongside this there will be several online rooms which you can drop in and out of depending on experience and interest: (more…)

Update from Imperial College Research Ethics Committee

Calling all postgrads!

Imperial College London would like to recruit a PG Student Representative for the Imperial College Research Ethics Committee (ICREC). Imperial College Research Ethics Committee was set up in order to meet requirements from external research funders for ethical review of proposals, which are not within the remit of NHS Research Ethics Committees.

A key aim of the Committee is to enable Imperial College to maintain the highest ethical standards in all research relating to human subjects.  ICREC normally convenes 6 times during each academic year, on a bi-monthly basis. The meetings normally take place on the second Tuesday of each month at our South Kensington Campus.

If you are interested in joining the Committee, please send a short letter outlining relevant experience and suitability. (more…)

Innovative teaching spaces built at Charing Cross’s lab block

Over the summer months, three lecture theatres in the Lab Block at the Charing Cross campus underwent extensive refurbishment. The changes are in line with the College’s Learning and Teaching Strategy, and the spaces have been redesigned to facilitate different, more effective teaching methods, and better accommodating small group teaching.

While the 10th floor space remains in a tiered, theatre structure, it has been fully redecorated and includes new seating and brighter lighting.

10th floor space before and after

(more…)

Student club offers training to build confidence in public speaking

Imperial College Speakers Toastmasters Club is a student-run club to help Imperial students improve their public speaking and communication skills in a friendly and supportive environment. At every meeting, students have the opportunity to give speeches on a variety of topics, practice impromptu speaking, offer constructive and detailed feedback to each other, and socialize with a diverse group of people from across the Imperial College community. Each meeting provides a valuable opportunity for students to hone the public speaking skills that are essential to effective lab meetings, conferences, class presentations, and other professional events.

Our club serves undergraduate and postgraduate students from all backgrounds. We recognise that students, especially those in the STEM subjects, are eager to find a welcoming venue to practice their speaking skills. We would also like to increase our diversity and reach out to students who would benefit from this club. Our club essentially provides the same service as professional public speaking coaching, but at a membership fee that is a fraction of the typical price of coaching. (more…)