This question was at the heart of our May DECoP webinar, presented by Dr Spyridon (Spyros) Karageorgos. Spyros is an Honorary Lecturer in the Blizard Institute, having graduated from the MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine last year. He presented the webinar from Aghia Sophia Children’s Hospital in Athens, where he is a Paediatric Resident.
The MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine is centred on the creation of a vibrant learning community in which students are active contributors, sharing and building their knowledge together. In his webinar, Spyros shared a range of strategies and initiatives used by the programme team to promote, encourage and support students’ engagement in the learning community.
The efforts to engage students in knowledge sharing and co-construction of knowledge start with learning design decisions and the choice of learning environment. The programme uses a forum-based structure, proposing clinical scenarios which students collectively investigate and solve. This approach takes advantage of the diverse and varied backgrounds and experiences of the student cohort, including doctors, nurses, paramedics and other healthcare professionals from around the world.
The incorporation of peer review and feedback also supports this collegial learning environment. Students have the opportunity to share their work for review and feedback from a peer, allowing them to see how other students approached the topic and task, as well as obtaining additional feedback on their work. The programme team provide marking guidance and a rubric to support students in reviewing and providing feedback to each other. Following positive feedback from students, the peer feedback opportunities have been extended to more assessments within the programme.
Although this approach helped build a strong, active learning community within a year group, as a student Spyros observed that it was hard for students to connect with those in other year groups. Together with one of his supervisors, he suggested creating a peer mentoring group. The programme team welcomed this suggestion and invited Spyros and Dani to lead the initiative. Now in its fourth year, the peer mentoring programme has been welcomed by students, who have shared that this acts as a safety net, giving them the opportunity to raise issues and questions with a peer before approaching the programme team. To improve the initiative, Spyros and Dani recently introduced Terms of Reference to help set clear expectations and guidelines, and training and support on how to be a good mentor.
One of the initiatives Spyros thinks has had the greatest impact on the sense of community, is the formation of writing groups led by the three honorary lecturers who were themselves previously students on the course. Small, multidisciplinary and cross-year groups of students work together on writing projects, including blog posts or critical appraisals for Don’t Forget the Bubbles, or research papers. So far this has results in eight published research papers (and another five in the works), prizes, research grants, research network collaborations and podcast appearances! Aligned with the writing groups, the team has started running writing workshops to help students develop their skills in writing for different audiences and media.
Finally, Spyros shared the Journal Club, launched in January for students in Blizard’s Paediatric Emergency, Emergency Medicine and Trauma Science MSc programmes (co-led with Libby Thomas). Each month, students gather to discuss and critically appraise a study co-presented by a student and faculty member from one of the MSc programmes. As well as learning about and discussing new research in their field, the journal club allows students to connect with peers in other programmes and widen their professional network.
Spyros emphasised that many of the initiatives he shared are works-in-progress, continually evolving and improving to better support the learning community. He highlighted the importance of such opportunities to connect, in a variety of ways, for online students. He invited feedback and suggestions to help further develop these initiatives.
Find out more
To learn more about student engagement initiatives within the MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine, or to provide feedback or suggestions, contact Spyros at s.karageorgos@smd21.qmul.ac.uk