National Heart and Lung Institute

Lead staff partner:  Tamlyn Peel

Other staff partners: Louise Donnelly (Course Lead), Megan Jones (Learning Technologist)

Student partners: Sajan Patel, Iman Shah, Michael Ogunjimi, Lorita Krasniqi

Background for the project

The rationale behind this StudentShapers project comes from the need to support students as they transit between year 3 of the MBBS course into year 4, which forms their BSc year. This transition can be difficult as students shift from a clinical year where teaching is largely delivered in a hospital setting, towards the year 4 BSc year, which is focussed around the application of science to medicine. To be fully prepared for the year 4 teaching, students need to revise and update aspects of their early years teaching (years 1 and 2) that are relevant to the specialism they have chosen. Much of the content already exists in the early years of the MBBS course, but this project set out to provide a revision network or ‘web’ in which medical students create content that is appropriate for the BSc offerings of all NHLI streams (Cardiovascular Science, Translation Respiratory Medicine and Remote Medicine).

Outputs

StudentShapers initially familiarised themselves with the problem, and discussed potential platform designs to address this in collaboration with staff. The idea of a ‘curated’ database of useful revision resources (mostly online content from outside the College), with a student/staff-written description to help students assess the usefulness of the resource to their revision, was selected. A search engine would display a bespoke set of resources for any search topic (e.g. specific upcoming session topic, concept student is uncomfortable with), using appropriate tagging of resources. Existing search platforms were critiqued to help shape an initial design.

Students decided resources should be categorised according to type to assist use;

•  Websites
• Videos
• Visual aids (Infographics)
• Research (journal articles; mostly review articles and seminal papers)
• Case studies (journal articles as well as other sources of cases)
• Test yourself (bespoke quiz with feedback)

Additionally, student partners planned their own revision resources specific to MBBS course content, namely short (<5 min) animations and infographics. Resources produced by students, for students, were considered more useful. A demonstration of the platform was built with Wix (available at: https://www.medsearchimperial.com/).

This allowed for an iterative design process, whereby successive draft versions of the website were fed back on by students and staff. A set of exemplar student-made resources (infographics and animations) were created for these search terms. The website facilitated creation of user guides, incorporating existing and desired functionality, to guide future development.

Benefits to student learning and further outcomes

The platform website is live and can be made available to students in the coming academic year, along with the user guides. Further development is envisaged and is aided with documentation.

The ultimate benefit to students is support in revising year 1-2 MBBS content before and during their 4th BSc year. The design of the final platform ensures staff screening of student-added content and auto-generation of review reports to ensure content remains up-to-date.

Initially the project addressed the NHLI BSc programmes; Cardiovascular Science, Translational Respiratory Medicine and Remote Medicine. However the platform is designed to be infinitely scalable, so once considered functional can be offered to other BSc streams with minimal additional work. If deemed useful by students, could be used for independent study sessions within BSc teaching, i.e. given specific search terms to review, perhaps with staff tagging resources they consider useful for each session.

It was key to engage with student partners from the outset of design, to ensure that the nature and navigation around the resource was most appropriate and usable for students – now that this has been established, the growth and usage of the project will be set along the right track.