Contents
Presenters
Ms Lucy Myers – Senior Lecturer Speech and Language Therapy
Professor Stian Reimers – Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Science
Workshop
One of the key challenges in the current UK Higher Education landscape is about how create scalable activities that work with large cohorts but that nevertheless feel playful, exploratory, engaging, and rewarding (McQueen, 2021). We present our experience working with around 200 students at a time from a range of health sciences disciplines – nursing, midwifery, speech and language therapy, and radiography – as they engaged in interprofessional learning activities (CAIPE, 2002). These activities were designed to allow students to learn about the other professional roles in their group, as part of their preparations for their own professional work.
In this session we will talk about two years’ experience of running interprofessional learning days with 12-16 concurrent groups of 10-15 students, relying on a combination of self-facilitation, student facilitation, drop-in visits from a facilitator who handled a number of rooms, and centrally-led activities. In these centrally-led activities groups competed against other groups in different rooms on several activities, interacting with the session leader and other rooms via a Teams webcast presented to all rooms, and PollEverywhere. Prizes – in the form of snacks – are then delivered to the winning rooms after the activity.
We will give an overview of the requirements for the training, and a number of the activities we ran. These include a competitive ice-breaking task in which students in each room have to find the most surprising thing that at least three people in the room have in common; a getting-to-know-you activity based on holiday-park linked bingo games where groups of four have a scratchcard bingo sheet each; a beat-the-computer quiz in which groups have to identify items associated with all the professions and enter them into a webpage as quickly as possible; and an AI-driven activity in which students explain each other’s professional roles to an eight-year-old, which is played by a specially designed chatbot (Reimers & Myers, 2024).
The session will present the rationale for each task, an evaluation based on our own experience of running the tasks and student evaluations, and the potential for developing further scalable small-group activities for interprofessional learning and other areas.
Attendees will gain an insight into some of the tensions in teaching increasingly large cohorts, and some of the ways in which student engagement might be maintained.
References
CAIPE, 2002. Interprofessional education – a definition. Available at: www.caipe.org.
McQueen, H. (2021, July 19). Teaching at scale: Reaching all your students in large classes. Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/teaching-scale-reaching-all-your-students-large-classes
Reimers, S., & Myers, L. (2024). Using generative AI agents for scalable roleplay activities in the health sciences. In S. Beckingham, J. Lawrence, S. Powell, & P. Hartley (Eds.), Using generative AI effectively in higher education: Sustainable and ethical practices for learning, teaching, and assessment (pp. 82-86). Routledge.
