Anne Vanhoestenberghe (Division of Surgery and Interventional Science), Michael Thomas (Biochemistry), Sara Ghoreishizadeh (Division of Surgery and Interventional Science)
45 minute discussion
The panel will share their experience of leading project modules in undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes in the faculties of Engineering and Medical Sciences. Our approach is not to offer ready made “solutions” for one field, but rather to engage the audience in a discussion with a hope of generating cross-pollination of ideas and collating an overview of good practices from across fields (as well as identifying challenges, since we can’t improve what we do not identify as needing improvement).
Our starting point will be that we are told that students apply for our programmes because of the technical skills they expect to learn thanks to our emphasis on practical work. We argue that equating non-lecture based work to acquisition of technical skills is a limitation, and a lot of the learning outcomes of a lab or project are not specific to the techniques used, they are more general and can be acquired in home learning situations.
Identifying the element of non-lecture based learning that can be acquired from home could be beneficial in future years, for all students who cannot readily access the campus to study or are limited in the amount of technical work they can reproduce (whether it is because of unmet accessibility needs, caring duties or others).