Faculty of Medicine’s new IMPACTS Short Course – what is it?

Joana Dos Santos explains a new short course for Master’s students, IMPACTS (Inclusive Module on Professional And Critical Thinking Skills):

IMPACTS is an elective, non-credit bearing short-course for PG students in the Faculty of Medicine. 

What is the IMPACTS short course aiming to address?

As professionals, most of our skills have been acquired and refined through years of practice and interactions within our own scientific community. These essential skills to success notably include identifying key literature, critically engaging with different types of scientific publications, presenting data efficiently as well as interpreting and critically discussing complex data sets. Importantly, we might take some of these skills for granted and consequently expect our students to demonstrate them without having necessarily taught them, or taken into account the cultural, educational, linguistic or learning difficulties background of our students.

What will students learn on the course?

IMPACTS will take participating students on a journey in which they will notably interrogate the quality of the information they read, learn how to effectively navigate the literature, get insight into the reading and critical appraisal of a paper, make sense of scientific figures and discuss science – some basic scientist ingredients! The course will be both elective and non-credit bearing, and will be open to students on partner programmes.

IMPACTS’ delivery will be blended (a couple of face to face sessions and the bulk of the content completely online), allowing for Master’s students across all campuses to access content on their digital devices. A pilot delivery will commence from Autumn Term 2019-20 in Postgraduate FoM (call for interested programmes to follow soon) with the ultimate aim to offer the module more widely within the College.

Should you have any questions or would like to contribute to the course, please contact Joana Dos Santos (Teaching Fellow).

Other team members include Sophie Rutschmann, Wayne Mitchell, Jeffrey Vernon and Katie Stripe.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.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