MHS Teaching and Learning

I am going to take the opportunity of doing a final summary of our activity on teaching and learning for this year.  It has been an incredible year for us and our Faculty has made great progress during this year.  Our greatest challenge has been to implement the implement the review of undergraduate learning and teaching and it was very pleasing that we got a special mention at the annual Operational Performance Review to quote Professor Gilbert from the feedback letter to the Faculty.

 ”The priority was to improve the undergraduate experience, which would need imaginative strategies to enable the University to offer high quality education. The Review Group praised the Faculty for the initiatives taken to date in implementing the Review of Undergraduate Education’.

So that was good news…

Over the past few weeks, the Learning and Teaching Committee and the Undergraduate review implementation group have been producing guidance and plans for a raft of initiatives, these are:

• E-learning strategic plan
• Academic advisers
• Plan to improve student satisfaction
• Implementation plan for review of learning and teaching

These are all available on the Faculty intranet or just by clicking on the individual bullet point.

Meeting with students

Over the past few weeks, I, Geoff Carter and representatives from the Learning and Teaching committee have been meeting with students from our Schools, as part of our Faculty review of the Schools.  This has been an incredibly useful experience and our discussions were very wide ranging. In general, the students were very supportive of the changes that we are making and we had great feedback from them, some of this highlighted very good issues and some was justifiably critical.  We are analysing this and I will circulate this in the New Year.  I would like to thank Chris Jenkinson and Ali Yazdi of University of Manchester Students Union for all his help in organising these meetings. They were fantastically useful to us all.

Blogging….

I am also really please that the Medical School has started a Blog. This is edited by Caroline Boggis and is already receiving many daily hits.  If anyone wants to have a  look at this, here is the link

http://www.medlea.manchester.ac.uk/Blogs/ShowBlogs.aspx.

It is great to see another School come on board with a blog. I am meeting with Prof Leon Aarons from Pharmacy in the New Year to give him a lesson in setting up a Blog. So Pharmacy will soon be joining Dentistry and Medicine.  The other Schools will follow shortly, I hope.

That’s about it for this year. I hope that everyone has a great holiday break……..