Dean's Awards for Innovation in Teaching - Launched 2015

Winners of the Dean's Awards 2014-15 - 39,355 Euro awarded

The Dean of Health Sciences in 2015 launched the Dean's Awards for Innovation in Teaching. The inaugural call saw 16 applications from across the Faculty, representing a wide range of innovations. Seven awards were granted, and the winners presented the outcome of their projects at a showcase event on 23rd June 2016. You can view the podcasts and download the presentations below. An integral part of the Dean's Awards for Innovation in Teaching is the spread of these innovations and ideas across the Faculty and beyond, so should you wish to find out more about implementing these ideas in your area, please contact the project teams below.

Peter Harrison, School of Dental Science: peter.harrison@dental.tcd.ie
Podcast
Presentation
The objective of this innovation is to create a multimedia resource for training dental professionals relating to the diagnosis and treatment of periodontal (gum) disease. The resource will involve a combination of video, still imagery, audio and text content presented in short video format; these will typically range between 15 seconds and 3 minutes in length. The majority of this content will utilize macro (high zoom and focus) images to provide highly detailed content. If the initiative proves successful, and with recording equipment on-site, the equipment and method may be utilized by other dental faculty who wish to develop similar resources for other disciplines within dentistry. The initiative might also be used in other health professions; possible examples might include assessment of vital signs by nursing students, assessment of cranial nerve function or diagnosis of skin cancer by medical students.

Sylvia Huntley-Moore (shuntley@tcd.ie), Paul Costello & Patricia Cronin, School of Nursing & Midwifery
Podcast
We are proposing to develop an online quiz to assist students to understand and apply academic integrity to their work by learning to document their sources appropriately. We propose to use case studies drawn from a variety of sources students will encounter during their courses (books, journal articles, reports, Internet materials). The quiz will be developed in Articulate Storyline software and in order to give students more ways to access the quiz, it will be published in HTML5 for mobile browsers, Flash for desktops and laptops, and the Articulate Mobile Player for native iPad and Android. Having evaluated many of the available online plagiarism quizzes it was clear that none of them met our criteria in relation to relevance to the health sciences and the Harvard Referencing System, utility of design and immediacy of feedback.

Laure Marignol, School of Medicine, Discipline of Radiation Therapy: marignl@tcd.ie
Podcast
Presentation
This project will leverage the existing instructional design of the online education team to create a virtual interactive student-oriented learning environment for research skills development called The Trinity Research Education Environment or the TREE. The long term aim of the TREE is to enhance quality and dissemination outcomes of Trinity students' research at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The specific objective of this proposal is to use innovative interactive teaching methodologies to develop a customizable online research education environment. An interactive online interface will be created within Blackboard to host the TREE. The main page will outline the TREE, consisting of a core (trunk) composed of 5 key consecutive research steps and a series of interactive and customizable teaching material emerging from each of these steps (branches).

Marie Morris, School of Medicine, Education Division: morrism4@tcd.ie
Podcast
Presentation
This innovation will result in an improvement in the assessment of competence in clinical skills. For the past 40 years the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) has been the assessment method of choice in Nursing and Medicine. The limitation of this method is in the isolated and fragmented way in which skills are assessed. This innovation in assessment consists of an Alternative Clinical Examination, dubbed ACE which tests all of the Irish Medical Council's eight domains of professional practice. It is an integrative assessment approach that incorporates these competencies within one exam, more reflective of the real life setting. This integrative assessment methodology can be utilised in all disciplines within the Faculty of Health Sciences where clinical skills are being examined.

Bahman Nasseroleslami, Academic Unit of Neurology (nasserob@tcd.ie), School of Medicine; John S. Butler, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering; Edmund C. Lalor, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering; Richard G. Carson, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience; Richard B. Reilly, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering; Orla Hardiman, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute
Podcast
Presentation
The application of mathematical principles to real-life clinical situations is not always communicated in a manner that engages students. We propose a new approach, suitable for undergraduates in medicine, Human Health and Disease, Occupational Therapy and Engineering, and for multi-disciplinary graduate courses in Neuroscience and Neural Engineering. The proposed teaching aid is based on using interactive computer animations of the working principles of neural engineering and applied neurophysiology. The schematics for these interactive animations are drawn with reference to seminal review papers and allow the student to see the mathematical principles in action and to interactively test and experience the effect of using different parameters. These interactive animations, programmed in MATLAB®, can run on PC/Mac, in web browsers, and will be portable to mobile devices in near future; hence, providing wide usability at work and on-the-go.

John Walsh, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences: jjwalsh@tcd.ie
Podcast
Virtually all microtubule disrupting agents in clinical use for the treatment of many forms of cancer are naturally occurring or semi-synthetic derivatives of nature-derived substances. The purpose of this online module is to present under one umbrella all aspects relating to their development "from bench to bedside" in an evidence-based format suitable for research-led teaching at University level. The unique feature of this module will be its multidisciplinary content spanning the chemical, biological to the clinical sciences. The presentation will place particular emphasis on the utilisation of interactive illustrations (e.g. click and reveal or mouseover) to display details for explanatory diagrams, case studies, interactive problem based exercises, branching scenarios and reflection.

Karen Dinneen (karen.dinneen@dental.tcd.ie) & Pascaline Fresneau (pascalene.fresneau@dental.tcd.ie), School of Dental Science
Podcast
Presentation
During the successful pilot of distance learning for the National Dental Nursing Training Programme, it became apparent that student engagement with the online tools within the Virtual Learning Environment was not as active as anticipated; Only 8 students of 41 (20%) regularly participated on the discussion forum. To increase online engagement and socialisation, we propose to introduce additional online teaching and learning activities on Blackboard Learn for all students commencing September 2015. These include additional discussion forums, quizzes and group work. These activities will be based on gamification pedagogy where learning is made more appealing (Apostol et al., 2013) by using game-based online activities to further promote learning and online social interaction in a fun and entertaining way.