College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine Good Practice Showcase 2020

Photo credit: Alex Litvin, Unsplash CC0

In this extra post, Victoria Bennett, Academic Administrator (QAE) and Claire Phillips, Dean Quality Assurance, at the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, highlight four talks presented at the annual event that highlights good practice across the College. This year’s theme focused on ‘Assessment’…


Each year the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine holds an event to showcase examples of good practice in learning and teaching across the College. Each event is organised around an overarching theme which we encourage presenters to interpret broadly. Past themes have included ‘building academic communities’ and ‘feedback’. The theme for the 2020 showcase was ‘assessment’. Due to the ongoing pandemic, our event in March 2020 sadly had to be cancelled. Our 2020 presenters have kindly agreed to record the presentations they would have made at this event and we present these here.

Presentation 1:  Assessment literacy for graduate attribute enhancement: interdisciplinary collaboration and evolution of Miller’s Pyramid in Biomedical Sciences and Veterinary Medicine

Presenters: Susan Rhind, R(D)SVS and Kevin Robertson, Deanery of Biomedical Sciences

This presentation describes a collaborative project to migrate and adapt assessment literacy focused teaching approaches from a Veterinary to a Biomedical Sciences context. A particular focus for the project – supported by a small PTAS award – will be to assess the impact of assessment literacy-based teaching on student perceptions of graduate attribute development.

Link to the 14-minute presentation here.


Presentation 2: Getting Creative with Assessments for Distance Learners

Presenters: Sharon Boyd, R(D)SVS with graduates Nancy McLean, MSc in Equine Science, and Mirjam Neu, MSc in International Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law.

This presentation reports on the work of the team of students and staff who critically reviewed assessments being used for online distance learning postgraduate programmes at the institution. The main focus of the review was to identify assessment approaches which could be used to develop creative assessments in the animal sciences. The process highlighted areas of best practice from the perspective of students undertaking the assessments.

Link to the 17-minute presentation here.


Presentation 3: An holistic approach to programme evaluation

Presenters: Gill Aitken, Derek Jones and Tim Fawns

In this presentation Gill Aitken, Derek Jones and Tim Fawns from Clinical Education talk about the range of evaluation methods they employ to ensure the continuing high quality of their programme.

Link to the 17-minute presentation here.


Presentation 4: OER digital curation using xerte within a Master of Public Health online group assessment

Presenters: Brendan Owers and Ruth McQuillan, Deanery of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences and Alison Christie, Business School

This presentation describes how Xerte was used to facilitate the creation of open educational resources (OER) by our online students, providing them an opportunity to further their digital capabilities whilst thinking critically about themselves in a digital world. It will cover the effort involved in setting this up, what Xerte is, how students approached this task, their feedback and how we intend to apply this to future assignments.

Please note this recording is from the ALT Winter Conference 2019. Efforts have been made to remove chat notification sounds and our slides setting the wider context of this work and programme. Further information on the ALT presentation can be found here: https://altc.alt.ac.uk/online2019/sessions/350/

Link to the 18-minute presentation here.


photograph of the authorVictoria Bennett

Victoria is Academic Administrator (QAE) at the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Victoria works closely with the College Dean Quality Assurance to ensure College oversight and enhancement of QAE processes and to support opportunities to share good practice in learning, teaching and assessment across the College.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *