Chrissy Stokes, Head of Professional Development & Engagement, The Physiological Society

Harry Witchel, Senior Lecturer in Physiology, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK

Patrick Evans, Undergraduate, University of Bristol, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.107.22

25–28 April 2017, University College London, London, UK

Chrissy Stokes, Head of Professional Development & Engagement, The Physiological Society

‘Practical Innovations in the Life Sciences’ was an H3 symposium organised by the Education and Teaching Theme Leads, Sheila Amici-Dargan, Nick Freestone and Derek Scott. The two-day workshop was put together to facilitate the sharing of new ideas and best practice in practical and classroom teaching, as well as engagement with the public. The audience included educational practitioners and developers, technicians and undergraduate students.

Day one focussed on teaching practical science, with talks showcasing a variety of tried and tested methods to improve student engagement, skill and understanding. Day two began with a plenary session on the use of technology in learning, and was followed by sessions on alternative approaches to classroom teaching and public engagement.

Amongst the talks there was also a structured discussion looking at common obstacles in teaching practical physiology and opportunities to ‘stretch the able’, with attendees providing invaluable feedback regarding potential opportunities for The Society to provide support in these areas.

Harry Witchel, Senior Lecturer in Physiology, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK

Future issue: ethics, governance and commercial enterprises in research on social learning platforms

At the ‘Practical Innovations in Life Science Education’ H3 symposium, physiologists (and other life scientists) showed how they successfully incorporate social learning platforms into their didactic service provision and pedagogic research. Many of these IT platforms are externally provided, commercial systems, including the ubiquitous Quizlet [as highlighted by Louise Robinson’s (Derby) talk on ‘Gamification in HE Teaching’].

In Sheila Amici-Dargan’s (Cardiff) talk ‘Platforms with Potential’, her team invited students to use Learnium (another social learning platform) to enhance their understanding of human pathophysiology. Their research showed that over half of the students surveyed said they used the system, while 54% stated they felt it was either useful or very useful.

This raises ethical questions about benefit sharing and revenues when universities interact with commercial organisations providing a nominally free service. Research is expected to provide shared benefits to participants, communities providing ‘biological’ material and future generations, as well as to the researchers, their universities and profit-making organisations. For example, when geneticists research a family with a rare genetic disease, individual research participants may have a right to share the benefits/profits of the intellectual property. Likewise, when traditional plant knowledge of an indigenous people is developed into a potential treatment by a company, we expect the indigenous people to benefit equitably. However, not all benefits are revenue streams, and in many cases there are practical difficulties in revenue sharing with research participants, even in genetics research.

How does this play out in ethical approval for pedagogic research with commercial IT platform providers? Commercial enterprises benefit from voluntarily engaged university-driven teaching research because of the publicity for the commercial platform and the database of use statistics they gain. Yet, as shown in the H3 symposium, these platforms are routinely used in educational research, and it is not standard ethical practise for universities to charge the commercial IT platform providers for access to their students. Quite the opposite, the commercial social learning platform providers often can charge money for user-access to those platforms. The argument is that this is not exploitation because the student end-users benefit indirectly via later improvements in their career prospects.

Reversing these institutional arrangements that benefit large platform providers is ‘one of the major tasks now facing a critical political economy of culture and communications’ [Murdock G (2011). Political economies as moral economies: commodities, gifts, and public goods. In: Wasko J, Murdock G, Sousa H (Eds), The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications. (London: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 11–40].Thus, in the current climate, when senior managers request under-resourced education researchers to demand payments from commercial social learning platform providers in order to provide additional revenue to the university, it may be less related to current best practice in ethics or governance, and more related to wishful thinking.

An undergraduate perspective on speaking at a Society symposium

Patrick Evans
University of Bristol, UK

I became aware of the workshop through my third-year supervisor, who advised us to give a talk about our final year neuroscience dissertation project. It was a public engagement project, which was a new type of project trialled for the first time this year. Together with my project partner, Elodie Cox, we created a video to explain our designated topic, which was memory engram cells, and presented it to a non-scientific public audience. We thought it would be of interest to share our experience.

Although I was initially quite nervous to be attending a workshop alongside university staff, it soon became clear that it would be a very valuable experience. There were a lot of ideas to be shared and it was great to see how absorbed and interested everyone was in each other’s presentations. The morning presentations were focused on the use of technology in university, so as a student I felt very relevant to the discussions. The second session saw more talks on the theme of public engagement. It gave me an insight to a completely different side of university and it was encouraging to see the attendees were enthusiastic and committed to benefitting our learning.

In the future, a combined attendance of university staff and students alike could be very beneficial to both parties – after all, us students will be the first-hand receivers of many of the ideas that were discussed.