The role of practicals in an integrated curriculum

Video >> Sarah Freeman:  “The way that the curriculum is organised, we have a small number of lectures, they will have three cases that they’ll work through during the week, and then we try and theme the week and the skills and the practicals and the lectures, everything around that. “So the cases illustrate again …

Involving qualified professionals in lab-based practicals

Video >> Video playing: “The equipment you will need is clippers, swabs, antisceptic scrub and surgical spirit, methods of restraining the horse, clean sterile bottles of local anaesthetic, sterile needles, and sterile syringes. Nerve blocks involve the injection of local anaesthetics…” Sarah: “We have some people who volunteer to come along and some people that we …

Learning communication skills from groupwork in practical sessions

Video >> Video playing: “You should always clip before performing an ultrasound examination. Air and dirt trapped within the animal’s coat will interfere with the transmission of ultrasound and prevent you obtaining diagnostic images.” Sarah: “They work in groups through quite a lot of the practicals so a number of the skills that they have …

Demonstrating practical skills to large groups using an overhead visualiser

Video >> Sarah Freeman: “We start almost all of our practical classes off with some sort of demonstration showing the students where they’re supposed to be looking at things, what they’re supposed to be doing, and then allow them to go and spend the time working, working it out for themselves.” Sarah demonstrating with the …

Giving feedback on practical sessions via a podcast

Video >> Sarah Westwater-Wood: “In the Therapeutics Studies module I teach three groups the same thing every week and they’re two hour long lectures and it’s quite intensive delivery of manual skills and underpinning knowledge. When I finish the week’s practical sessions I realise that there are common things that I want to feed back …

Video demonstrations of common laboratory techniques address student diversity and limited lab time

Sally Chappell and Paddy Tighe: “When people start the MSc in Molecular Diagnostics they come with quite varied levels of experience. Some of our students have been working in industry or a related area for maybe a year or two years, so they’re quite comfortable with lab techniques, whilst others come straight from a degree …

Effective demonstration of bench practical skills to large laboratory classes using an integrated system of visualisers, screens and SMARTboard

Colin Melia: “In these labs, we teach our students how to make different types of medicines including liquid medicines, creams, ointments, powders and suppositories. The students learn skills that they’ll have to use when they work in a hospital pharmacy manufacturing unit, a ‘specials’ medicines lab or anywhere where individual medicines have to be made …

Learning through labs and practical work

Video >> Kate: “In a subject such as yours, what do you think are the main purposes of running practical classes for your students?” Martin: “The main purpose in this case is to reinforce the material that we’ve dealt with in the lecture. The lectures are good for describing concepts and explaining principles, but in …

Assessment: in class multiple-choice

Video >> Julian: “If they are making any errors of description then we can talk them through ‘that’s not really the gizzard that’s the ovary’. So talking them through and helping it, at the end of it we get a multiple choice questionnaire which we ask them to complete, based on both the lab and …

Using laboratory classes to teach experimental design

John Harris, Martin Luck and Alan Waterfall: Background “In previous years Animal Physiology students have carried out set laboratory experiments to illustrate the effects of exercise on cardiovascular responses. These were prescriptive laboratory sessions, each resulting in a written report. The teaching team felt that many students were completing these with insufficient thought and without …