Dean's Awards for Innovation in Teaching - Launched 2015

Winners of the Dean's Awards 2017-18 - 15,610 Euro awarded

The fourth year of the Dean's Awards for Innovation in Teaching sought to support innovations that would further one or more of the objectives of the Trinity Education Project. Five innovations were supported across the schools of Medicine and Nursing & Midwifery.

Dr Denis Barry, School of Medicine, Department of Anatomy
The goal of this project is to further enhance our teaching perspectives in the Department of Anatomy to vertical align student learning with professional requirements of radiology proficiency. We wish to match cadaveric cross-sectional anatomy (coronal planes) of the thorax, abdomen and pelvis to selected CT and MR imagery, which are viewed and interpreted ‘feet-up’ in the bodies coronal plane. Amongst the departments teaching and learning resources are twelve cross sectional plates of one body donor which are protected by and displayed in glass cases. These plates are one inch thick and were serially sectioned from the thorax, abdomen and pelvis. These plates are excellent for learning and teaching clinically relevant anatomy as they train the students’ view of the three dimensional anatomy in transverse sections and are hence very similar to the view they would see in CT or MRI images. As the plates are exceptionally rare, limited in number and delicate, they can currently not adequately be used for large group teaching and assessment purposes and remain as a secondary teaching tool alongside plastic models and body donors. A three dimensional digital replication of the same plates which students can manipulate using the digital imaging and communications (DICOM) system in the anatomy practical laboratory would make these plates a progressive and informative learning resource for all student groups. By overlaying these digital replications with appropriate healthy and pathological CT and MR images, the plates will become a very valuable addition to the education of future health care graduates from TCD. They will foster the integration of traditional anatomy teaching with clinically relevant anatomy, enhance the use of our state of the art DICOM system in the teaching lab, and they will allow preservation the traditional cross sectional plates.

Dr Annemarie Bennett, Assistant Professor in Dietetics; Dr Ann-Marie Morrissey, Assistant Professor in Occupational Therapy; Dr Patrick Murphy, Assistant Professor in Psychology - School of Medicine.
CORU, the regulatory body for health and social care professions, requires graduates of accredited programmes to be competent in reflective practice, which facilitates clinical reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, and peer and self-directed learning. This project aims to develop the verbal reflection skills of undergraduate allied health students through an e-learning module. Informed by focus group data, the project team will draft the e-learning module and case studies. Content will be reviewed by focus group participants and sent to Trinity Online Services for realisation. The project team will use the resources with their students, via a Flipped Classroom approach, where (1) students engage with existing resources to gain a baseline understanding of reflection (2) students independently complete the e-learning module developed by the applicants and (3) applicants will teach classes using the case studies developed to enhance verbal reflection. The module will be evaluated and based on feedback, refinements will be made with Trinity Online Services before the revised module is made available to all allied health disciplines through Blackboard.

Dr Éilish Burke, Ussher Assistant Professor in Ageing and Intellectual Disability, School of Nursing and Midwifery.
This project proposes incorporating an existing Trinity Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) into the on campus learning experience for Junior Fresh students from the School of Nursing and Midwifery Intellectual Disability module. By blending MOOC content with on-campus learning, a novel, innovative means of educational delivery is suggested for Trinity. The MOOC will complement the classroom and clinical skills lab by providing foundational knowledge prior to engaging in practical hands on skills. A variety of student-orientated teaching styles to promote collaboration, critical thinking and enhanced student engagement are used. Students will view videos, engage in quizzes, reflect on case studies, and participate in monitored discussion boards, pre designed to elicit active and critical reflection. Blending the MOOC with the classroom supports the inclusion of a broad scope of materials otherwise impossible in a face to face setting. It will stimulate the student’s online and on-campus interactions and compliment the blended style aimed for in the students’ module.

Dr Gobnait Byrne, School of Nursing & Midwifery
Project Team: Dr Paul Costello, Dr Catherine McCabe, Ms Fiona Murphy, Dr Anne-Marie Brady, Dr Cristin Ryan, Dr Martina Hennessy
Title: Trinity Interactive Online Drug Calculation Module
The aim for this module is to develop a numeracy and drug calculation prototype online module to meet the numeracy and drug calculations educational needs for undergraduate nursing and midwifery students. First year pharmacy and first year medical students will also access this module. This module will be divided into two components. (1) The students will learn about drug calculations for oral and liquid medications and calculate dosages which are based on a patient’s weight. (2) In the second component, students will learn advanced drug calculation skills necessary for the administration of intravenous fluids and care of the critically ill adult. This online programme will include a basic numeracy test that students need to complete successfully before they can enter a simulated hospital ward (residential setting for Intellectual Disability students). Students will be presented with clinical scenarios from their specific discipline and according to their academic year. These case-based realistically illustrated patient scenarios will include clinical charts, prescription labels and diagrams and will simulate practice. It will integrate relevant national and local policies on both medication and patient safety. The scenarios will reflect the roles of the different healthcare professionals and foster inter-professional learning as the students will learn about the roles of different healthcare professionals in the promotion of medication safety and quality of care.

Dr Matthew McGovern, Department of Paediatrics, School of Medicine.
Clinical paediatrics is an exciting but challenging area for undergraduate students. One of the challenges encountered in teaching our undergraduates is that students will be exposed to slightly different learning experience while on clinical placements due to the inherently diverse range of hospital inpatients during a particular rotation. While the undergraduate curriculum is appropriately robust to account for much of this, the learning needs of one group of students may still vary slightly from that of another due to differing clinical experiences during rotation. This project will use established pedagogy techniques in an innovative way to identify the individual learning needs of separate groups of medical undergraduates and use this information to design teaching sessions that address these needs. Our aim is to engage students in identifying areas of weakness and then using this information to design interactive teaching sessions which are tailored to the needs of these students.