MHS Teaching and Learning

You may remember that our last post was concerned with the build up to the annual operational performance review.  This is an important part of the strategic and operational performance of the Faculty and we are are reviewed on our annual performance by a team led by the President.  I am only going to provide an update on the review of teaching and learning.

The review was led by Professor Colin Stirling, VP for teaching and learning and evaluated all aspects of our work over the last year.  He started by commenting that we had a good strategic plan, importantly, we knew what we were trying to achieve and had a good plan to achieve these aims.  The major area of initial discussion was on the results of the national student survey and while there was copious praise for the dental school, I was asked what steps we were going to take to improve the performance across the faculty.  I and the other heads of schools described our plans which were essentially to improve communication in the Schools, introduce academic advisors as soon as possible and improve student feedback.  We also explained that each School had been asked to produce an action plan that was School specific (this will be the subject of a following post).

We then outlined our method of implementation of academic advisors with a target of all advisors being in place and meeting their students on a one-to-one basis by the start of the second semester this year.  This was then followed by a discussion on how we had set up our e-learning team and their method of working. Again, I will be providing a Faculty update on this in the next couple of weeks.  The review team were particularly impressed with the fact that we had set up an e-learning team in such a short time and they had delivered the roll out of Blackboard

The final part of the discussion was concerned with widening participation and the plans for integrating the Manchester Leadership Programme in all our programmes.  This, again was received very well.

At the end of the session the President summed up the overall performance and he stated that in terms of learning and teaching we were performing very well and he was particularly impressed with our effectiveness in implementing the recommendations of the review of teaching and learning. He was, however, concerned with the results of the national student survey and it was essential that the results were improved next year.  So overall our progress and performance was felt to be good. This is a reflection of the hard work that everyone is doing on the implementation and we have to keep the momentum going. This is the tricky bit, as it is fine to have a plan, the difficult thing is to carry it out!

Over the next few weeks, we will be preparing detailed action plans to improve student satisfaction and introduce academic advisors, I will be discussing these in future blogs.