MHS Teaching and Learning

Well the long hot summer is drawing to a close and some of us are back at the University.  This year my holiday was in Didsbury, South Manchester as we thought that it would be good to see England. Unfortunately, the weather put a dampener on that idea. So I went and bought and iPhone and have wasted hours and days messing about with it. I also built a garden gate, here is a picture of both items….

 So, back to work and here is an update on teaching and learning.  The most important event prior to the summer break was the extra meeting of Senate that was called to specifically discuss the strategy for personalised learning.  This document is readily available and is here……..

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

Before I go on I should give a bit of background on what Senate is. Senate is one of the governing bodies of the University and is made up of elected and appointed members. It meets four times a year.

The Roman Senate

The University of Manchester Senate

This definition is taken from the University website

Senate is the principal academic body of the University of Manchester, and is responsible for the promotion of research, and for the regulation of the education and discipline of students of the University. Its main powers, designated by Statute, include:

• to formulate and keep under review, in consultation with Faculties, the academic strategy of the University
• to promote research, scholarship, learning and teaching
• to superintend and regulate the recruitment, selection, admission, education and assessment of the students of the University; to award degrees or other academic distinctions and to regulate the conduct, discipline and academic progress of the students
• to monitor and maintain academic standards, to monitor and enhance the quality of academic provision, and to approve new programmes of study
• to appoint the internal examiners of the University, and to recommend to the Board of Governors the appointment of the external examiners of the University
• to establish, modify or revise schemes for the academic structure and organisation of the University

The membership of Senate is…..

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/governance/senatemembership.pdf

In short it was necessary for Senate to approve the implementation of the Review of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning.  The meeting was interesting and the discussion was lively.  There were two main sides to this discussion, there were those who clearly saw that it was essential to improve the undergraduate experience and that one major component of this was the strengthening of personalized learning and academic advisors.  There were also those who agreed with the overall aim but they did not feel that it was necessary to have academic advisors and they argued that the present systems were adequate.  The eventual outcome was that the changes were approved by a majority of Senate and we can now get on with the implementation. Remember that this part of the review is concerned with increasing interaction with students and providing them with more than a confined education.  We must not be in the position of students feeling that “nobody knows my name”……

We then held a meeting of the Faculty implementation group and I managed to get landed with the job of writing a plan for the implementation of personalized learning.  The first stage has been to get information about what we currently do.  I have now done this and my feeling is that with respect to the academic advisor role we already do a lot as many of students complete portfolios and have discussions with tutors on an individual basis, particularly on clinical placements. However, my feeling is that much of this is reactive and we need to make the change to make input from academic staff more reactive.  We also need to ensure that all students have an advisor and meet with them regularly.  I have also obtained staff:student ratios for all schools and asked heads of Schools to let me have information on how many of their staff have minimal contact with students.  This information will then allow me to draw up a plan that will be further developed by the implementation group and circulated.

Another issue that is going to be very important is how we provide a wider education for our students.  To a degree, we are confined in what we teach because of our regulatory bodies, there is scope for us to widen the curriculum in terms of leadership, volunteering and university wide core courses.  In a previous post I mentioned discussions with the Manchester Leadership Programme (MLP) 

http://www.careers.manchester.ac.uk/mlp/

These were very fruitful and the result was that the Faculty Teaching and Learning Committee were keen that MLP became a core course in each of our programmes.  The Dental School and Pharmacy were ideally placed to start this straight away and we held discussions with MLP.  Following these discussions we decided that MLP will be a compulsory part of the third year in dentistry and the other Schools in the Faculty will make changes to their curricula so that they could facilitate this move over the next year.  I then attended a University implementation group and it was decided that increasing student involvement in MLP was the way to go across the University and a working group has been formed to do this. In the meantime, the Dental School will be considered to a pilot for this expansion.  So, our faculty had taken the initiative and the lead here. We will update you with progress.

I feel that we are now at the point of really getting going with the changes that are necessary to improve our undergraduate experience and times are getting exciting. We are also due to receive the results of the National Student Survey in the next few days.  I will update you on this and other developments when I get back from a conference in Croatia next week.