MHS Teaching and Learning

Following on from my last post… I am just back from holiday to the Wild West of America and I thought that I would illustrate the title of this post with a picture of me studying geography. I am standing at Dead Horse Point just outside Canyonlands National Park and looking at a drop of 2,500 feet and I am looking uncomfortable because I really do not like heights! Before I went I was discussing my trip with Professor Alan North, Dean of Faculty, and he suggested that I took a car down the Shaffer Trail and I have included a picture of this below, sometimes I wonder if he is trying to tell me something!

Anyway, on with more relevant matters, as many of you will know we are just starting to implement the review of teaching and learning and I hope that this is one of many updates on our progress.  While the review has been well publicised and discussed at Senate, there seem to be many people who are not aware of its aims, contents and implications.  So here is an update……

The review was started in September 2007 and led by Professor Alan Gilbert with the main aim of improving our undergraduate teaching and learning.  Or, more formally….

“To embrace all aspects of teaching and learning, including the overall Manchester student experience. It will be charged with developing a comprehensive set of recommendations for achieving step change and improvement in the quality of undergraduate education in the University and is being established on the basis that it will undertake the review at a fundamental level and without being constrained by existing structures and processes”.

There are many reasons for this review being carried out.  The most important was that there was a realisation that, while we were delivering our teaching and learning well, there were many areas that required improvement if we were to progress our teaching and become world leaders.

The final report was published in February 2008 and several implementation groups were formed. 

Full details of the review and conclusions are at:

http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/tlso/reviewteachinglearning/

Before starting my current job I was Head of the Dental School for three years, and during this time we delivered strategic plans which we implemented successfully. When I was appointed to my present role, I attended my first meetings and asked “what is the plan?”. It became obvious very quickly that there was no real strategy for undergraduate teaching, as most of the efforts had been spent, quite rightly, on ensuring that the new University had excellent quality assurance processes following the merger.  So now times have changed and I am excited that we have produced a strategic and implementation plan to make necessary changes to one of our major areas of activity.  While this produces many challenges, I am confident that we can make a real difference to our University.

Our Faculty implementation group has met once, and the University group has met twice.  I have now also met with all Heads of School on a one-to-one basis and arranged to attend all of our School boards or away days.  I think that our Faculty and Schools have a lot of work to do to make the changes that are necessary. I have identified these challenges in to four main areas that we should address to make substantial improvements.

Personalised Learning including Academic Advisors

Broadening the curriculum

Citizenship

E-learning

Perhaps the most important concept in the review is that of personalised learning and academic advisors. Interestingly, this is the area that has strong support but is very challenging. If you want an example of the changes that we are trying to achieve and perhaps some inspiration, have a look at this video clip on You Tube. While this is not Manchester, it does illustrate several problems that are present in UK Higher Education.

Vision of Students today

Our major challenge in this area is for us to promote a culture in which students can develop constructive academic relationships with teachers and a sense of identity within a cohort of learners.  The main way that this will be achieved is to ensure that students have a choice in what they learn and this can be delivered using a range of learning styles.  For example, we cannot continue to provide courses that are based solely on large lecture delivery.  The easy way forward here is for us to say that we already do this, as we rely on small group teaching and one to one contact in our clinical teaching. But I am sure that this is not enough and we are currently investigating all curricula to identify our current practices, so that we can make changes, as and when necessary.

One area that is major challenge is the role of the academic advisor.  It was a major recommendation of the review that all students should have an academic advisor who would make contact with their students on a weekly basis using an appropriate combination of face to face meetings, email, and on-line communications.  The role of the advisor is to be a general source of academic advice, reflect on their personal portfolio and manage students’ academic progress.

I have discussed this with all the Heads of School and undergraduate leads for each School and it appears that, in general, we have systems that are in place for student support.  However, at present these tend to be reactive rather than proactive and we need to change this.  Importantly, the role of advisor raises major challenges as we have large cohorts of students and many staff have told me that it is not possible to make this change.  But, this is essential to our efforts and we must find a way to make this work.  I will be consulting widely on this concept over the next few months and we aim to make substantial progress in the next academic year.  I would be grateful for comments on this particularly from any students who are reading the blog…

The other area that I want to mention in this post is broadening the curriculum and this is why the title of this post is “dentists doing geography”.  When I was at school thinking about my career choices I really enjoyed Geography and the decision to give this up to take sciences was hard.  I still think that when I was at University studying dentistry, it would have been great to take a module in Geography.  This, of course, was not possible and I finished my course knowing a lot about dental care, but nothing about anything else!  I still think that this was a lost opportunity.

This leads us to a recommendation that our curricula are too narrow and we need to broaden it to produce undergraduates who are equipped with the skills and knowledge to enable them to make a positive contribution to society in the 21st century.  The current suggestion is that the University considers broadening the curricula in the area of global citizenship.  The exact nature of this is still under discussion, but again this provides us with an opportunity of giving our undergraduates a unique education. As a first stage in moving in this direction I am having discussions with the Manchester Leadership Programme and other organisations to find out if there is scope for all our undergraduates to attend other courses and also undertake more volunteering activity in the community outside of our health care settings. I will report back on this shortly…..

This is rather a long post and I will update you next week on further progress with e-learning and more general matters….It has been a long week and we have made great progress, time for a beer and curry..