Imperial Learning and Teaching

ImpVis is a staff-student project dedicated to helping students learn abstract STEM concepts by helping them develop a more intuitive, visual understanding. The aim of ImpVis is to create custom-made, interactive visualisations that are well-aligned with the learning objectives of the module they are being used in. The project is targeted at three main audiences: learners, instructors, and creators. This underpins the design of the recently launched website, which is centred around three environments: ‘Learn’, where visualisations are presented in collections and linked to specific modules; ‘Teach’, which lists all our stand-alone visualisations categorised by topic area and ‘Code’, outlining our visualisation development process.

Dr Caroline Clewley, ImpVis project lead:

At the time of the inception of ImpVis, I had recently completed a Masters in Education that was focussed on how students learn difficult, abstract concepts in special relativity – the module that I taught at the time. One of the outcomes of my MEd project was that visualisation plays an important role in gaining a deeper understanding of abstract concepts and students would often go in search of visual resources for self-study. However, one of the major hurdles to finding existing resources is that they often do not align well with the course: they may use different terminology, symbols, or simply focus on different learning objectives. Creating your own visualisation that suits your needs as a lecturer is challenging as it requires a wide skill set (not to mention plenty of time): programming skills, in-depth subject knowledge, an eye for visual design as well as an intimate understanding of how students learn and which concepts they struggle with and why. If you do manage to create a useful visualisation, the next challenge is to ensure it is straightforward for students to engage with it in an effective manner.

We set up ImpVis to address these challenges, focussing on three key characteristics:

1. 1. 1. Students and staff work in partnership to design and develop the visualisations, combining their expertise to create effective learning tools.
      2. Any visualisations we create are easily accessible: there should be no software to download or install, no plugins needed, no need to sign up to any services, and minimal restrictions on the users’ platform or device.
      3. The visualisations are designed in such a way that they can be implemented in a wide variety of learning and teaching settings (e.g. a lecture, self-study, part of a problem class, etc) so that each can be used in a way that is most suited to their learning objectives.

Working in partnership with students is fundamental to our project. Our main principles of working in partnership are simple: we respect the expertise each partner brings into the project, we have mutual ownership of both the work process and the final product, and we have shared responsibility for the project overall with everyone taking on specific, co-negotiated roles. I have always believed working in this way has a positive impact on our student partners, but at the time of inception I could never have guessed how it would transform my own experience as well. There are many students who stay with us throughout the years – you end up working truly as collaborators towards achieving a common goal, which in turns results in strong relationships. This has resulted in a dedicated and inclusive community working on ImpVis both in term time and over the summer breaks.

Despite the pandemic, we are still running our weekly term-time Code & Crisps sessions, though it is now ‘bring-your-own’ crisps as we meet virtually. During these sessions we work together on the project: improving visualisations, discussing new ideas and inducting new members to the community. Experienced students act as mentors to new people and help them learn the coding and design skills needed to create visualisations. As we grow, we are moving towards a model whereby we have a core team of students in the summer working on innovation within the project and supporting satellite projects – projects run all over College by small groups of staff and students creating visualisations for their specific modules.

Looking ahead at the next academic year, we are very excited to be running an I-Explore STEMM module together with the Virtual / Augmented Reality (VR/AR) group. In this module, 2^nd and 3^rd year undergraduates from all over College will be able to learn about interactive visualisations and VR/AR as well as design their own visual learning tools for their peers to aid their understanding of STEMM concepts.

Robert King, Imperial College London Physics MSci graduate 2020:

Taking part in the ImpVis project was one of the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects of my undergraduate degree. During my four years in this project I have had the opportunity to work both as a summer UROP student and as a term-time mentor and I have seen how this project has developed from a small set of ideas to a rich suite. One of the most amazing parts of being part of ImpVis is that I have not only witnessed this transformation, but I have had the chance to directly mould it by collaborating directly with a diverse team of staff and fellow students.

As a physics fresher I had little to no previous experience in web development or making educational resources however through working on ImpVis I have had the chance to greatly develop these skills. Indeed, after these four years I am considering a further career in educational technology and being a part of ImpVis has allowed me to develop a comprehensive slate of professional experience in this field.

Working with the amazing network of ImpVis collaborators consisting of cross departmental students and staff members has also allowed me to develop my leadership and teaching skills. In the past few years of the project I have served as a technical lead and mentor for new students to the project.  Working as a technical leader, my main objective has been to work towards developing a modern yet approachable platform for students and their staff partners to develop the visualisations on. During the development, we worked as a team to discuss and narrow down different design approaches for how visualisations should be structured to be of greatest educational value both in the context of a student at home and of a lecturer. Being a mentor to my peers has also been a great experience, working collaboratively to help teach budding developers the skills and tools they need to build their own visualisations.

Get involved:
ImpVis can help in your STEM courses too. Visit our website to find relevant visualisations that are freely accessible, or even create your own collection of visualisations for your module. Publishing a collection on our website is easy: sign up as a user, request instructor permissions and create a new collection via your user dashboard.

Whether you are a student or staff, if you want to create new visualisations for your STEM module, get in touch with us and we will help you set up a partnership and get started on the development process.

Read Project: ImpVis in full

by Dallas Alexandrou, Operations Manager (Postgraduate Education), Faculty of Medicine Centre

The Faculty of Medicine (FoM) PG Education Team is launching a new approach to supporting postgraduate programmes as they address challenges, identify opportunities, and enhance the student learning experience.  This new approach is called Education Transformation.

FoM Postgraduate Teaching has successfully completed the process of Curriculum Review for 20 distinct programmes and now, supported by the College’s Learning and Teaching Strategy, we are moving into this new phase of Education Transformation as a way of developing educational solutions, working in collaboration with programme teams and other colleagues.  Education Transformation goes beyond ‘what we teach’ to tackle how we teach, how the students know they’re learning, and how the students ‘belong’ while they’re here.

All FoM PG programmes completing Curriculum Review can submit project proposals to Education Transformation, bidding for resource allocation. These proposals will be subject to a rigorous review process, governed by the Education Transformation Board. Project proposals are welcomed from single programmes or clusters of programmes, and resources to support education change, including digital development, will be made available to successful proposals.

At its simplest, the aim is to transform pedagogy and enhance the staff-student experience across postgraduate teaching in FoM.

For further information, please go to the Education Transformation web pages, and if you have any specific questions, please direct these to: EducationTransformation@imperial.ac.uk.

Read Education Transformation: Transforming pedagogy and enhancing the staff-student experience across Faculty of Medicine postgraduate teaching in full

The Teaching Fellow Development Fund supports Teaching Fellows and Learning Technologists in pursuing development opportunities. Bhakti Visani and Neha Ahuja (School of Public Health) were recently invited to present at a conference in Japan and the Teaching Fellow Development Fund helped them get there. Read about what they learnt at the conference in their blog post below.

By Bhakti Visani and Neha Ahuja (School of Public Health)

As two GP trainees currently taking an OOPE to do a medical education fellowship, we were both extremely lucky to go to Kyoto, Japan for the WONCA Asia Pacific Region (APR) Conference 2019 in May this year to present our experiences and learning in this post.

Why were we there? South East Asia’s primary care systems are currently in their infancy, but there is a strong drive to improve its standing and recognition because, as has been consistently shown across the world, high-quality primary care is the bedrock of a high performing health system and has the ability to reduce all-cause mortality, increase life expectancy, lower health inequalities and reduce costs amongst many other benefits.

This was one of the biggest lessons that was reinforced for us. Do we truly appreciate what we have until its gone? Often forgotten in the UK, this shows why we should invest our time and energy into high quality primary care and create a passion for it in our students too.

Amongst talks about the benefits of Primary Care, we also learnt from a myriad of streams including mentorship, education, quality improvement and surviving in the profession as a young doctor.

Dr. Felicity Goodyear-Smith gave us examples of a patient and clinician engagement programme (PACE) with doctor-patient dyads co-creating research. This was a great insight into forward movement in social accountability where the key stakeholders have ownership of the studies, use the findings and assist in dissemination. This of course raises questions about the implications on the professional boundaries in the doctor-patient relationship, and this short BJGP article explores their thoughts. If you are interested in the project, you might find this paper on PaCE gives a good insight.

Another stark idea that was floated was about doing too much medicine. Dr. Iona Heath gave a powerful talk on the harms of overdiagnosis as well as our misconceptions on the benefits of multiple interventions. We already know that the burden of adverse drug reaction in the UK is high, with a report in 2006 showing that they result in 250, 000 UK admissions a year!

If you are as interested in this as us, you may find these links useful: Preventing Overdiagnosis and Choosing Wisely UK.

We also had the pleasure of learning about the cultural considerations in teaching and learning in a truly cross-cultural workshop run by none other than our wonderful colleague Dr. Maham Stanyon!

Kyoto itself was beautiful to explore; full of Shrines, Pagodas and Zen gardens that seemed to be taken straight from a dream!

As an added bonus, we had an extra few days before the conference to try some local delicacies like Japanese curry, Ramen, Mochi and Melon-Pan! We dressed up in traditional kimonos and even came across geisha down an unsuspecting alley.

Despite the flaws in our UK primary care system, this opportunity reaffirmed our choice to be GPs and to be proponents for investing in a system that has the potential to truly have large scale health impacts when done in the right way.

Read The Teaching Fellow Development Fund: Bhakti and Neha’s trip to Kyoto in full

By Lucy Heming, Senior Assistant Registrar (Quality Assurance and Enhancement)

In May 2019, I travelled with 11 colleagues from universities across England and Scotland to America for a study tour arranged by the Association of University Administrators. We spent a week in New York City and a week in Washington, D.C. visiting universities, higher education bodies and the Department of Education. The purpose of our tour was to explore three themes: Student Expectations, Experience and Success; Research and Teaching; and, Funding in Higher Education.

We visited 11 HE institutions while we were there, covering a range of types: publicly funded and privately funded; UG focussed and PG focussed; community colleges and four year universities… What became apparent through our visit was the similarity of challenges facing higher education institutions in the US, to our own institutions in the UK and across the different types of institution in the US. There were also parallels to the work I am involved in at Imperial as part of the Quality Assurance and Enhancement Team and working closely on supporting the implementation of the Learning and Teaching Strategy through the Learning and Teaching Committee.

A big theme in the US was student success and how this was described and perceived. Given students in the US largely pay higher fees than students in the UK, it is not surprising there is a public, media and governmental narrative around the need for students to reap a financial benefit from their time at university. These debates are present in the UK and are particularly pertinent right now following the release of the Augar report. However, all of the institutions we spoke to defined student success more broadly than financial returns, seeking to ensure students had a well-rounded education, that students who were not entering with the same cultural and educational capital as others were given opportunities to thrive and that all students understood what it meant to be a good citizen and part of a diverse and inclusive community. This was seen, for example, through Columbia University’s ‘awakening our democracy’ discussion series and ‘engineering for humanity’ focus, programmes at all institutions to specifically support first-generation entrants, and Northern Virginia’s Community College focus on educating students in healthcare professions which would be directly of use to the local community (marrying up employment prospects with community needs).

The work Imperial College is doing in implementing the Learning and Teaching Strategy and specific developments such as I-Explore clearly align with these efforts, promoting inclusive learning and teaching approaches and curricula and providing students with opportunities to engage with other students on disciplinary and non-disciplinary studies. Discussions underway on how the College can build on internationalisation opportunities, widen participation further and enable all students to share their cultural capital in curricula and extra-curricula activities also tally with similar discussions in the US.

Connections between research and teaching are very important for Imperial and equally as important for most of the HEIs we visited in the US. As undergraduate students tend to follow a general education syllabus in the first two years of their studies before specialising in a major in their final two years, the modules with the most direct connection to research in the US HEIs tended to be at postgraduate level. However we saw good examples of the opportunities for students to explore the research in which their lecturers are engaged through assisting on research projects in their undergraduate years, similar to Imperial’s successful Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP). An example of this was at Rutgers University which runs a 10 week paid summer science programme where undergraduate students undertake lab work, along with in-year opportunities.

Rethinking curricula and learning and teaching methods was evident in the US institutions we visited. At American University, Faculty Learning Communities were being developed to enable staff with a similar interest to work together on generating and implementing ideas. These were staff driven but centrally funded and had been formed around areas such as decolonising the curriculum. Faculty were also being trained on how to have conversations around difficult subjects and were then training other faculty, sharing knowledge and building support networks for each other. This reflects models being used at Imperial by the Educational Development Office and Education Office about equipping staff to learn from each other and identify their own areas of transformation.

This opportunity to learn from other institutions and colleagues helps inform the way in which I will go about my job in future. I would encourage others to make the most of opportunities to do something similar.

To find out more about the Association of University Administrators, go to https://aua.ac.uk/ or email your branch advocates, Lucy Heming and Jon Milner-Matthews at aua@imperial.ac.uk

To find out more about the study trip, you can search #AUAUSA2019 on social media channels or read the blog posts at https://aua.ac.uk/aua-usa-study-tour-aua-blog-part-one/ (part two will be available soon). A full report on the visit will be available in the Autumn.

You can also hear Lucy’s thoughts on the similarities and differences between UK and US higher education on the ‘NACUBO in brief’ podcast here or wherever you usually download your podcasts.

Read Seeking out opportunities to learn from others – similarities and differences between UK and US higher education in full

by Katie Stripe, E-Learning Technologist, National Heart Lung Institute

On March 26 myself and Katie Piatt, University of Brighton, hosted a meeting at the College to launch the IMPLEMnT website to the London learning technologies community and colleagues at Imperial who have contributed to the site and been generally supportive. You may remember a blog I did a little while ago on the development of IMPLEMnT.

We started the day by updating Twitter with the new branding from amandalayton.com. We then, through our newly branded Twitter, set the scene for the day by tweeting about the meeting.

What was the aim?

Demonstrating some of the technologies detailed on the IMPLEMEnT website and encouraging attendees to consider how they might contribute to and make use of the project in the future.

Who attended?

We had around 60 attendees from institutions across London, including about 20 representatives from Imperial College, as well as representatives from University of Brighton and Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

In total 25 institutions were represented and all Imperial faculties, as well as the Careers Service and the Library.

Warming up the crowd

Nothing engages a room full of learning technologists better than a bit of competition! Especially given there were prizes.

We kicked off by demonstrating quiz platform, Kahoot. There were of course rumours of cheating and ‘it’s a fix’ when first place went to Julie Voce organiser of the meeting.

The project

This was a short interlude in which we presented the project, its aims, its reasoning and how it is intended to work with and for the community. This part was not interactive but nevertheless used Canva, another technology from the IMPLEMnT site. Canva is an online graphics tool for creating, amongst other things, infographics and simple presentations.

The tagging problem

One of the issues that we have encountered while building the IMPLEMnT site is the taxonomy we use and finding a balance between making it manageable while allowing the community to express the technologies used in its own terms. To highlight this we had the audience on their devices again to run a Poll Everywhere session where we asked them to tag two of the most well-known technologies we have on the site – YouTube and TurnitIn.

In both cases the audience came up with much wider ranging tags that we had decided on for the site. This highlights 2 issues. One, the broad range of descriptions available to people when describing technology and two, because of the joys of the English language we have multiple ways of saying exactly the same thing!

What we say and how we say it

We also looked at how IMPLEMnT is addressing the issues of language and how it is used in education. Of course, run as a quiz with a round on Latin, which managed to get 8 thumbs downs on Mentimeter, although a quick show of hands revealed a fair few people in the audience had studied Latin in school.

There is however a serious point to this which is to highlight the dangers we can face by the use of jargon when approaching academics to incorporate technology in their teaching.

Words like constructivism, contextual and entity, while perhaps appropriate when writing an academic paper on the use of learning technology may not be at all helpful when trying to increase engagement. One of the slides asked the audience to share what they thought the meaning of constructivism is and the answers ranged from “guiding students to build their own understanding” to “???” which just goes to show even in a room of professionals the range of understanding is extremely varied.

Spinning it all together

The final part of our presentation involved Katie Piatt and a spinning wheel.

She spun the wheel to ask the audience: What can be used to support…by…?

This was a method of collecting some case studies for the site from the audience and of generating conversation around the tools used for certain types of teaching by forcing people to think past presenting with PowerPoint. However, this is also the future of the site. The wheel asked questions such as “What technology can be used to support collaboration by video” and in answering this question we are giving the users of the IMPLEMnT site ideas for themselves and their own teaching. We are also encouraging the community to share ideas.

The next phase of site development will be to make sharing easier, our postcards were not just a gimmick but a prototype of what we want to achieve. We are hoping that the site itself will hold full case studies but that those will be reduced to a format similar to the post cards which can be printed, shared on social media or embedded in other sites for training or promotion. Watch this space!

If you want a set of postcards then all you need to do is submit a technology or a case study to the site and we will put a set in the mail for you!

Read Launching IMPLEMnT – a learning technology toolkit in full

Dr Tiffany Chiu, Teaching Fellow in Educational Development, Educational Development Unit

Dr Freddie Page, Strategic Teaching Fellow, Dyson School of Design Engineering

The Learning and Teaching Strategy aims to establish a supportive and inclusive scholarly community which helps students with the transition to study at Imperial. To achieve this, the Strategy has stressed the importance of “managing expectations and ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to play an active part in our academic community”. We recognise the challenges of the transition from school to university where expectations of university students are not always made explicit and transparent, which are central to inclusive and diverse learning and teaching practices.

Anecdotal evidence from staff conversations, especially at Imperial, has highlighted the increasing concern that students are taking a pragmatic approach to their education. That is, students are over-emphasising academic outcomes/grades, and overlooking the holistic aims of higher education, such as the importance of transferable and higher-order skills development. To support the development of an inclusive culture of diversity, we need to generate conversation and discussion on what it means to be a university student and what we expect from our students within our curriculum. For establishing a platform to initiate this kind of conversation, we have used the Ideal University Student survey as part of induction exercises in the Dyson School of Design Engineering to discuss any potential mismatches between student and staff expectations. This survey is an ongoing educational research which looks into views and expectations of what it means to be a university student, from the perspectives of students and staff in higher education. Below we briefly describe how this exercise can be facilitated in class:

We used the final part of the first year Design Engineers’ induction to the department talk to run a segment titled University Learning. We wanted to build upon students’ thoughts on the most important qualities of a university student before prompting them, so we asked students to spend 5-10 minutes completing the ideal university student survey (idealunistudent.com) individually before moving to discussion. The survey contains fifty-one qualities related to university learning, and students had to score how important they thought each was. After students completed the survey, they discussed in groups their ideas on the most important features of a student in Design Engineering and then submitted their answers to a Mentimeter poll. Students were also asked to respond to their thoughts on tutor expectations (i.e. What do you think the tutors think the most important features are?).

During the whole class discussion, we asked students to elaborate what they had agreed was important and why. This cohort identified ‘innovation, ‘collaboration’, and ‘critical thinking’ as being particularly important and thought that their tutors might also expect students to have ‘good communication skills’ and to get ‘enough sleep’.

We also discussed the relative weighting to the degree of the first year and the master’s project (the project carries more weight than the total first year). With these discussions, we hope students are able to see the university is a journey that supports them to develop their identity as an engineer, rather than focusing heavily on chasing every last mark. We also showed students what employers often look for when recruiting graduates, and what our programme’s learning outcomes are and how they align to this. We hope that by reinforcing this attitude throughout the degree, students are able to take more responsibility for their learning and see our programme as a framework to help them to succeed. Ultimately, we hope to support our students to become well-rounded independent graduates with a high level of self-efficacy.

To find out more about this project, please visit the Ideal University Student website. If you would like to discuss how you can use this exercise to manage student expectations, please drop us an email.

Dr Tiffany Chiu (t.chiu@imperial.ac.uk)

Dr Freddie Page (freddie.page@imperial.ac.uk)

Read Managing student expectations and understanding of what it means to be an Imperial student in full

The College is launching a new promotions framework for staff whose primary focus is teaching. It is designed to recognise achievements in the delivery of the College’s educational mission, for example innovating curricula and pedagogy, educational scholarship, and educational research and evaluation. It also recognises those that have taken up national and international leadership roles which support the College’s mission to excel and to lead in the field of Higher Education.

What has changed?

We’ve put in place a revised career structure which allows for two distinct career pathways for learning and teaching staff:

• A practitioner pathway enabling educational practitioners to access promotion based on their contribution and impact
• An educational research pathway for staff focussed on scholarly activity and research within higher education, as opposed to research within their own subject discipline

A new pathway

The new career pathway for staff focussed on educational research, leading to Professor of Education, is now live. New job titles also include Associate Professor of Education and Reader in Education. Titles are conferred to reflect disciplinary context, e.g. Professor of Engineering Education, Associate Professor of Digital Education, Reader in Higher Education etc.

Staff currently within the Learning and Teaching job family and the Academic and Research job family may apply for promotion via this pathway. Staff should also be aware that research responsibilities will be included in their contract, and they will therefore be considered as ‘research active’ for REF.

Who decides?

The Promotions Committee will include the Assistant Provost (Learning and Teaching) and the Director of Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship, in addition to the Vice-Provost (Education).

What are the criteria?

Staff will be expected to have influence and impact at Faculty/College Level, be making a significant contribution to the delivery of the Learning and Teaching Strategy, and be increasingly involved in educational research and scholarship. They should also be contributing to the field of pedagogy and enhancing day-to-day practice.

What is considered ‘educational research’?

The College anticipates that most educational research will fall into the following four categories:

Practice – reporting aspects of pedagogic practice. Written by practitioners, for practitioners; case-study type approach; local context.

Research – reporting pedagogic research studies, presenting empirical data. Related to practice of authors or others, but focus is presenting data and conclusions; used as evidence.

Theoretical – range of evidence to present, clarify or critique pedagogic theory or theoretical frameworks. Written by academic theorists.

Policy – presenting vision of ‘best practice’, using evidence. Written by government, professional bodies, senior practitioners etc.
The educational research output is expected to be of the highest quality, in line with expectations from other disciplinary areas represented within the College.

It will take time for colleagues, and the College in general, to develop expertise to this level.  In this context, it is important to recognise that there may be other markers of quality, and different approaches to establishing a ‘profile’ and evidencing ‘impact’, which may not be typical in other disciplinary areas.

How can I find out more?

Further guidance is available in Appendix 5 – Criteria for Promotion for Senior Learning and Teaching Staff

Read Academic Promotions – Educational Research in full