Category: Teaching

Fourteen outstanding Master’s Scholars Imperial-bound

From a very strong field of 300 applicants, fourteen outstanding students have been awarded Scholarships by the Faculty of Medicine to support their Master’s study and research when they join Imperial in October. Dean’s Scholarships covering fees and a £17,500 stipend were awarded to four exceptional applicants (one home, one EU student and two overseas), while a further ten outstanding students received Faculty Scholarships of £17,500. Of these, two were home students, three EU and five overseas. Many congratulations to our Scholars (listed below).

masters schols“I haven’t been this happy in my life, or maybe I just forgot this level of happiness”
“Thank you very much for this generous support towards my education – I feel short of words to express my gratitude for this award”
“I’m so honoured to have been chosen by the Faculty of Medicine. I appreciate and am humbled by their confidence in my abilities”

Scholars are taking programmes across our Master’s portfolio of 31 courses, from MRes  degrees in Experimental Neuroscience, Cancer Biology, Biomedical Research & Clinical Research (Diabetes & Obesity), through science MSc programmes in Immunology, Human Molecular Genetics, Molecular Medicine, Epidemiology and Paediatrics, to an MEd in Surgical Education and a Master’s in Public Health (Global Health).

masters degsThe awards were the culmination of an e-mail and poster advertising campaign which has seen Master’s applicant numbers increase by 22% over the same time last year, and overseas numbers by 34%.  Many thanks to our very photogenic 2013-14 scholars (in last year’s precursor to the current scheme), who generously agreed to grace the posters, and to PGT Administrator Jim Osborne for designing them.

The success of the scheme meant an enormous amount of work to score 300 detailed online  applications, shortlist 30 candidates for interview, Skype interview each, and decide who would get the Dean’s and who the Faculty awards.  This was made possible with the generous help of Laki Buluwela, Kirsten Dalrymple, Andrew Edwards, Dan Elson, Christine Franey, Gary Frost, Steve Gentleman, Mick Jones, Birgit Leitinger, Mark Sullivan and Ernesto Yague.  Many thanks to everyone.

Awarded Dean’s Scholarships: Louise Kenny (Surgical Education), Auste Kanapeckaite (Molecular Medicine), Iva Filipovic (Immunology), Jennifer Martin (Human Molecular Genetics)

Awarded Faculty Scholarships: Patricio Alzaraz Couret (Paediatrics), Emily Barnes (Cancer Biology), Mei Ran Abellona U (Biomedical Research), Madeleine Hurry (Experimental Neuroscience), Lakshmi Regnier Cadavieco (Molecular Medicine), Viktoriya Nilolova (Experimental Neuroscience), Alison Ower (Epidemiology), Petros Christofides (Epidemiology), Robin Schafer (Public Health – Global Health) and Gala Farooq (Clinical Research – Diabetes & Obesity).

Dr Jane Saffell Faculty of Medicine Academic Lead for PG Courses

A new five-year graduate medicine programme from 2015-16

After much consideration and discussion, the School of Medicine has taken the decision that it will no longer offer a four-year graduate entry programme with effect from 2015-16.

The new five-year programme

Graduate students will instead be able to apply for a more tailored, five-year programme with exemption from the BSc honours year.

This decision was taken in the light of the 2012 Graduate Entry review, student feedback about the intensity of the programme and the lack of opportunities to pursue research and scholarship, and the potential of full registration with the GMC being conferred on graduation, which would mean a four-year programme does not meet the requisite training hours to meet current EU requirements.

More information about this new programme will be provided in due course.

Chris Harris
Quality and Educational Development Manager
Faculty Education Office (Medicine)

14 Faculty of Medicine Master’s Scholarships available

The Faculty of Medicine is offering generous scholarships to students with outstanding academic potential who apply in 2014 for one of the 30 Master’s courses run by its Schools, Institutes and Departments.

There are 4 Dean’s Master’s Scholarships available (full fees plus £17.5K flexible stipend), 2 for Home/EU and 2 for Overseas students, and 10 Faculty Master’s Scholarships (£17.5K flexible stipend), open to both Home/EU and overseas students.  Application is via an online form and the deadline is 31 March 2014.

Please advertise these widely to attract the best students to our courses. Posters such as those below (plus more styles) are available for download.  These can be printed for display in your location and/or sent via e-mail to prospective applicants or contacts in other universities (and overseas) who would be willing to circulate the information to their life science/medicine undergraduates.

If you have any queries about the Scholarships or Master’s courses, please contact Jim Osborne

posters

 

School of Medicine reorganisation and new Head of Undergraduate School of Medicine

The School of Medicine has recently been reorganised – adopting a new structure to establish clearer leadership and strengthen links with academic departments and the NHS.

Martin LuptonMr Martin Lupton (previously one of the Deputy Directors of Education) has been appointed as Head of Undergraduate School of Medicine. Martin took some time to speak to us about his new role, what the reorganisation means for medical students and how he believes the university education experience will evolve in the coming years.

Q: Congratulations on your appointment as the Head of Undergraduate School of Medicine. Can you describe this new role, as well as your main aims and objectives?

Thank you. I think the best way to describe this new role is as a facilitator and communicator. As the Chair of the School Board, my primary responsibilities are to facilitate the new leadership team in their work to improve the quality of our educational offering and to ensure that at every level the School listens to and is responsive to its students and staff (both those in our academic departments and in NHS settings).

Q: The School of Medicine has recently been reorganised with a new structure. How will these changes provide benefits to the educational offering and student experience?

Imperial College School of Medicine is a great and very large organisation, requiring collaboration across North West London. To ensure that the School can build on its success at a time of enormous change both in the University sector and the NHS, we have developed a new structure. The new structure will allow us to concentrate on the twin challenges of strategy and delivery.

Q: Which aspects of the role are you most looking forward to, and what do you envisage your greatest challenges to be?

The aspect of the role I most look forward to is also the greatest challenge.  The changes in the NHS are going to require significant parallel changes in our curriculum.  This is undoubtedly going to be difficult to achieve, but provides us with amazing opportunities to refresh and improve the content of our course.

Q: With the rise of online learning and social media, how do you think the higher education experience will change at Imperial over the coming years?

Imperial College Medical School is in a state of permanent evolution. We have already introduced iPads to the senior clinical years and have been developing high quality learning materials to populate an information spine that runs in parallel with our curriculum map. I think that in time more of the factual content of our course will be delivered through on line learning, which will be fantastic as it will allow us to use our human resource to concentrate on the ancient and unchanging need for apprenticeship and interaction in clinical medicine. The new and the old will work with increasing synergy.

Q: What do you see as the greatest benefits and opportunities for medical students studying at Imperial?

Where to begin? The two outstanding opportunities for our students are science and medical excellence. Imperial is a world class scientific institution and our students have a unique opportunity to be exposed to medical science in its evolution, from bench to bedside. Furthermore the Academic Health Partnership gathers together a stable of some of the most famous hospitals in the world, which care for probably the most diverse population in the world, in arguably the greatest city in the world and our students study in this environment! Why would you want to go anywhere else?

New Faculty of Medicine website

After a few exceptionally busy months, we relaunched our Faculty webpages on Friday 17 January 2014.

The new website has been in development for a while to showcase the work of the Faculty within our main research themes. In order to do this, research landing pages have been developed and the old and out of date material removed.

Our research on film

A large and exciting part of the project was to produce a high quality video for each ‘research landing page’ to more easily communicate what the Faculty is doing in each main area of research. Whilst the filming was completed in late-October (thank you to all that were involved!), the editing process took a bit longer than had been anticipated – trying to cut down the footage filmed in half in order to fit into the time allocated for each video was tricky.

We produced 13 videos in total: 11 for the research themes, another to give an overview of our research and one to better communicate how, through the AHSC and NIHR Imperial BRC, the Faculty translates its research.

Other objectives for the website were to:

  • Improve the homepage:
    • making it easier to navigate to key content
    • better promote news, social media activity and other content
    • increase awareness of the Academic Health Science centre and our other strategic initiatives
  • Improve the way we are communicating research across the Faculty:
    • Creating a much improved “Our research” landing page
    • Better communication of the AHSC, NIHR Imperial BRC and other strategic partnerships and initiatives
  • Review, reduce and re-prioritise content:
    • Changing our main navigation
    • Culling old, out of date and unused content
  • Audience focussed architecture:
    • Re-purposing “teaching” into “Prospective students” giving a better overview of our courses / education and in particular our Master’s degrees
    • Better information / signposting for Staff
    • Better content for the “about us” section
  • Preparation for the College website re-design / CMS project:
    • Details below

College website re-design project

With the new College website design and content management system (CMS) on the horizon, we have taken the opportunity to review content, and where necessary, cull out of date, old and redundant pages. This will make transferring to the new design and CMS a much easier, and less time consuming, process.

By using Google Analytics data (and information on when pages were last edited), we reviewed page views etc to decide what content was clearly not being visited and where content was extremely old, removing it from the website.

There is still work to be done to further improve the website and we are looking forward to getting to grips with a new content management system and college website design in the coming months.

We’ll be in touch with website editors and owners in the coming months to discuss and plan how the wider faculty website transfer process is to happen.

If you have any comments or questions, please use the comments section below.

James and Al
Digital Communications Team, Faculty of Medicine

Holographic Assisted Lecturing in Orthopaedics


Dr Kapil Sugand graduated from Imperial College in 2010 with an intercalated BSc in Surgery and Anaesthesia. Alongside his clinical training, Dr Sugand is currently pursuing a PhD in surgical trauma simulation and educational technology under the supervision of Mr Gupte and Professor Cobb in the MSk Lab. As part of his studies, he is currently conducting research with multi-disciplinary team within a number of multimedia modalities to train safer surgeons and to ultimately enhance patient safety. He is the Co-Founder and Co-chair of the Holography Assisted Medical Learning and E-Teaching (HAMLET) group which has created quite a media buzz due to the innovative ground breaking research and has been covered by:

“It is a really interesting and exciting project to be working on, not only because of the academics involved, but also due to the scope this application has if proved a valuable and reliable teaching channel. The initial study was conducted on students, giving them an enhanced learning experience from which objective and subjective feedback was collated to assess the impact and value of holography-assisted lecturing. It will be interesting to see if this new learning experience will actually become the ‘gold-standard’ in levels of teaching/presenting.”, Dr Sugand commented.

The team are not just looking at the impact this has on graduate teaching but how it can be used in the wider medical world too. Holograms have the power to visually communicate with greater immersive impact than other presentation modalities so it may facilitate patients being able to understand the disease process and management options more effectively. Something to watch for the future; but we could see holography used as a means of patient engagement, improving compliance to management and being part of the ‘pre-habilitation’ phase of enhanced recovery programmes.

Zoe Williams
Public Engagement and Patient Involvement Manager
MSk Lab

The Faculty of Medicine’s winners at the first Student Academic Choice Awards

SACASInnovation and tutoring in the Faculty of Medicine were recognised in the first annual Student Academic Choice Awards (SACAs).

Faculty winners

Congratulations go to:

These awards are a first for academics and support staff, nominated and chosen entirely by students. The awards are designed to celebrate and reward good teaching and emphasise teaching as a skill of equal worth and value as research.

The long term aim of these annual awards is to build a community and ownership of the courses being delivered. It is also a chance for students to say ‘thank you’ to teaching staff.

Our congratulations are extended to all of the nominees. The full list can be seen at https://www.imperialcollegeunion.org/academicchoice

Fully Funded PhD Scholarships – Applications Now Open

We have just opened applications for two separate PhD scholarships, aiming to recruit a total of 8 students in total. The deadline for applicants is 10 July 2013 for all scholarships. Please distribute to all your masters students and encourage those who are suitable to apply by completing the relevant online application form available online, via the links below.

5 x FoM Dean’s PhD Scholarships

3 x MRC DTA PhD Studentships

Please contact me if you have any queries regarding the scholarships and do not hesitate to pass on my details to your students, for any queries.

Nousheen Tariq
Postgraduate Manager
FEO – Faculty Education Office

Faculty of Medicine Year 5 MBBS students issued iPads

There was a buzz outside the Drewe Lecture Theatre on Wednesday 5 June, as Year 5 Medical students gathered to collect their brand-new iPad Minis. Once all the iPads were handed out, Mr Martin Lupton, Deputy Director of Education, gave a welcome to the iPad pilot project followed by an introduction and demonstrations by Dr Maria Toro-Troconis, E-learning Strategy and Development Manager, and Mr Taylor Bennie, Learning Technologist.

The demonstrations were focused on all the activities the students will be able to do on their iPads, including:

  • Access to all learning materials via Blackboard Learn, being able to annotate and carry their notes wherever they go. The School has bought two apps for students: iAnnotate (which allows students to annotate documents in different formats) and Puffin, an Internet browser that allows students to render Flash content on their iPads.

  • Access to iBooks for different clinical attachments being able to record reflections.
  • Access to some sign-off forms (DOPS) on their iPads allowing clinical teachers to assess students and submit the DOPS to the Faculty Education Office electronically, keeping a record on the students’ iPads.
  • Access virtual clickers on their iPads via the Virtual G-Pad App allowing instant feedback during lectures.
  • Access to eBooks from the library.

After the demonstrations, Mr Jon Arntzen from ICT helped students set up all the iPads on the Imperial Mobile Device Management System, AirWatch, which will allow the eLearning team to push Apps to the students’ iPads, reset passcodes and wipe out all the information on any device that gets lost or stolen.

The Medical School will be also issuing iPad Minis to Year 6 MBBS students on 22nd July 2013. The pilot will run for two years finishing in 2015/16. The iPads will be returned to the Faculty of Medicine at the end of the pilot.

For further information on the iPad pilot please contact: webmaster.feo@imperial.ac.uk #iPadImperialFoM

Dr Maria Toro-Troconis
E-Learning Strategy and Development Manager
Faculty of Medicine

iPad pilot launch event at the Faculty of Medicine

iPad

The Faculty of Medicine will be piloting a project issuing iPads to students in years 5 and 6 of the MBBS course at the beginning of the 2013/14 academic term.

The main learning and teaching activities planned to be delivered on iPads are:

  • All the course learning materials will be accessed via Blackboard Learn.
  • Students on placements will be able to readily and easily access learning materials and their own notes, and be able to add reflections, etc.
  • Some sign-off forms (DOPS) will be available electronically on the iPads allowing clinical teachers to assess students and submit the DOPS to the Faculty Education Office electronically, keeping a record on the students’ iPads.
  • Students will be able to participate during lectures using virtual clickers hosted on their iPads.
  • Students will access interactive iBooks in the area of Obstetrics & Gynaecology.
  • Students will be able to receive updates from different sites directly on their iPads providing a direct communication channel with clinical sites.

The iPad pilot launch event took place on 15 May 2013 .

Dr Maria Toro-Troconis
E-Learning Strategy and Development Manager
Faculty of Medicine