MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

Are you on a Post Graduate Certificate in Education programme but feeling that maybe a lot of the material is too general to be of immediate use to you? Or perhaps you are a tutor on a PG Cert programme, who would like to be able to refer your students to relevant discipline specific resources?

If so then you will find the newly launched Supporting New Academic Staff (SNAS) online database provides a valuable additional resource to supplement the generic materials recommended for your course. The project to create this database was funded and led by the Higher Education Academy in response to feedback from the participants on PG Certificate in Education programmes.

This overwhelmingly showed that they want their courses to provide better links between generic theories on learning and teaching and the reality of teaching in their own particular discipline. SNAS is designed to provide this missing link.

The SNAS database identifies key topics typically covered in initial courses in learning and teaching for which discipline-specific resources would be useful, and then supplies short resource lists to provide a way in for new staff. Over 50 learning and teaching course tutors, staff in the Academy’s Registration and Accreditation Department and all the Academy’s 24 Subject Centres were involved in choosing and annotating suitable resources. At each stage the sector was consulted and the project revised according to users’ needs. SNAS was launched after a three-month pilot at the Heads of Educational Development Group Conference in June and it makes the resource lists available in an easily searchable format.

LTSN-01 was involved with the SNAS project from the beginning and has identified an appropriate set of discipline specific resources geared to the needs of medical teachers. These resources will also be of interest to dentists and vets but we are planning to develop corresponding resource sets for dentistry and veterinary medicine in the near future.

The topics covered by the medicine resources are: assessment; curriculum design, generic medical education, group work, problem based learning (PBL), Skills

For each topic we have chosen a small selection of key readings which you can use to build your discipline perspective on the learning and teaching process. The number of readings has been kept deliberately small in order to meet the needs of busy professionals for whom teaching is an important but not primary role and who have other major responsibilities.

For example the PBL topic has five resources consisting of a mix of articles, books, projects and literature reviews. For each resource there is a brief description to help you decide whether you would find it of interest. If you teach on a PG Cert programme you might also like to look at the case studies of how to use the resources which are on the website. They can be found in the ‘using SNAS’ section.

Feedback from users since the launch has been extremely positive. Above all, staff using the resources, have appreciated the way in which the project is responding to a perceived need from the sector and is helping to build a community of practice for colleagues supporting new academic staff.

Following on from the launch of the SNAS database we are aiming to further develop these communities of practice in order to share needs and expertise. If you are interested in joining such a community for medical, dental and veterinary teacher trainers, then please email me Nigel@ltsn-01":mailto to express your interest.