Megan Quentin-Baxter, Director

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Summary

Megan is Director of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine (MEDEV) hosted by the School of Medical Sciences Education Development at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, at Newcastle University.

As a Fellow (FHEA) of and working with the Academy and the sector she manages a small team who deliver programmes of activity designed to share good practice to promote professional development in order to contribute to the accreditation of staff and enhance the student learning experience (see the website). MEDEV publishes a regular newsletter, runs workshops and events, has a portfolio of mini-projects and subject specific activities (such as special interest groups), works with funded projects, and generally supports the sector through a blend of proactive and reactive engagements, most of which are driven from the grass roots needs of the sector. The team has worked closely with the Subject Centre for Health Sciences and Practice (based at King's College London) who provided a similar service for Nursing, Health Care Professions and related programmes.

Megan was awarded a SCORE Fellowship in 2011 to research open education educational resources 'policy, practice and rights'. In 2005 she was awarded a Newcastle University Teaching Fellowship. She serves on the Regs and Approvals sub-group of Faculty Teaching, Learning and Student Experience Committee, is a member of the University student discipinary panel, and is a personal tutor and an examiner for MBBS in-course assessment and student selected components.

She is regularly invited to speak or consulted (e.g. keynote speaker at the 2nd International Virtual Patients and MedBiquitous conference 2010; University of Sydney Medical Programme, 2006), has run many workshops and organizing chair for e.g. IMS-Global Alt-i-lab June 2005 (Sheffield) and Institutional Web Management Workshop 2001; served on programme committees such as OER11; the WWW conferences (Computer Networks and ISDN Systems), Hypertext, and regularly reviews for educational journals such as Medical Education, Medical Teacher and Journal of Digital Information. She also regularly reviews funding proposals, National Teaching Fellowship applications and claims for promotion. 

She has a strong interest in teaching standards and contributed to UK professional standards framework (UK PSF) consultations. In 2007 she was awarded a CETL case study looking at career development and promotion based on claims for teaching excellence. She is a Fellow (FAcadMEd) of and Member/Fellow Assessor for the Academy of Medical Educators and is on their Course Accreditation Working Group. 

As part of her remit Megan supports networks of practice; serves on special committees for the UK Higher Education Funding Councils; liaises with professional and statutory bodies and other organisations in the UK and beyond. She responded on behalf of the Academy to many professional and statutory body consultations. She has has worked closely with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), including serving on the Academy JISC Operational Group, to promote joined up approaches to support sector-specific services. 

Megan has raised over £4.2M funding as PI, and contributed to raising a further >£10M at Newcastle such as iridium (Managing Research Data, JISC); CETL4HealthNE funded by HEFCE, eDoctoring funded by the Paul Allan Foundation);  and >£33M elsewhere.

She has directed projects such as JISC PublishOER; Organising Open Educational Resources (OOER); information 'interoperability' in collaboration with the RDN/Intute; Shibboleth identity management (IAMSECT); e-Portfolios (EPICS) and development of a UK national bank of quality assured assessment items (UMAP and UK-CDR). She assisted a successful Lifelong Learning Network (VETNET) which aimed to influence flexibility of progression pathways in veterinary and related programmes for vocational learners in the UK. She is on or chairs many national project/service Advisory Boards.

Other roles and projects

• 2003-2004: Seconded 60% as the Health Education Learning Technologist with UK eUniversities Worldwide, London (UKeU the eUniversity) where Megan was responsible (working to the Chief Architect) for managing delivery of the portfolio of healthcare programmes on the UKeU learning platform. This required innovative solutions to reproduce on-line, for example, enquiry based approaches to support learning.
• 1994-2000: Promoted to Assistant Director of the Faculty of Medicine Computing Centre at Newcastle where Megan was a founding member of the team and responsible for developing and delivering innovative ICT and Medical Informatics/Evidence Based Medicine courses to medical, dental and biomedical science students and staff, and implementing many technical innovations to support delivery of the curriculum. The FMCC grew from 3 staff to form the core of the School of Medical Sciences Education Development with a staff of over 70. She managed major projects for Newcastle University and the Funding Councils e.g. Teaching and Learning Technologies Programme Phase 3 Project Number 86 Facilitated Network Learning in Medicine and Health Sciences (a consortium of five universities) where the aim was to 'disseminate ICT based approaches developed to facilitate, manage and support the interactive learning of medical and health care science students based in sites remote from the main university campus'. This project was seminal in establishing administrative as well as educational support for students (often located in practice) and is still the mainstay of learning support in the partner medical schools today. In addition to managing the staff on the project she developed Contracts, inter-institutional Memoranda of Understanding and detailed Project Plans, Evaluation Plans, Dissemination Plans, Risk and Stakeholder Analysis, regular Bi-monthly and Annual reporting.
• 1998-2000: Represented the Faculty of Medical Sciences in five Quality Assurance Agency Subject Reviews (24x4 and 23x1 achieved). She was responsible for regular evaluation of student and staff IT knowledge and attitudes (quantitative tests and qualitative questionnaires, structured interviews and focus groups). Megan shared the development and delivery of a student selected component for Stage 4 MBBS students which was fully subscribed and received a rating of ‘excellent’ in all student evaluations.
• 1988-1993: Worked in research, IT support/service provision and staff development while at Sheffield Hallam, Leeds Metropolitan and Wolverhampton universities.

Qualifications

• BSc (1986) Zoology major, University of Otago, New Zealand.
• PhD (1997) Developing and Evaluating a Hypermedia Computer-based Learning Package in Biology, Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Research focused on developing a interactive video disc alternative to performing a rat dissection in the classroom, and a quantitative evaluation of the suitability of hypermedia as a learning medium.
• Finalist European Academic Software Awards (1996) her rat dissection video software (now shared under CC-0 licence) was presented at the finals of the international EASA awards.
• UCISA Awards (1997) the Anatomy of the Knee Tutorial developed at Newcastle University was runner up in a national UCISA award.

Research interests

All things educational, specifically hypermedia, data mining, .

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