During the shift to both online and blended teaching delivery forced upon all University Educators across the sector due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, many of us will have been grappling with new technologies, re-writing course content and carefully considering and crafting our delivery options for anatomy teaching.

As part of our educational roles, we will all be familiar with the good practice of routinely evaluating our own teaching interventions/ innovations to inform our own teaching methods. Given that significant adaptations and changes to teaching have been forced upon us, we would urge everyone (who makes a significant teaching contribution within Higher Education) to think about how you might evaluate or research the efficacy of your new approaches in the current climate. This will not only be useful for shaping and informing your own curriculum sustainably in what will eventually become the ‘new normal’, but the findings might also be something to disseminate within the anatomy education community to raise the profile of these innovations and to enhance you own educational portfolio.

Given the current circumstances it is worth considering the implementation of a more detailed feedback or evaluation process beyond that of standard curriculum module evaluation procedures. I will outline the approaches you can put in place to provide some meaningful feedback or action research principles you can apply on your teaching initiatives, ranging from very basic to more advanced.

Dr Scott Border
Principal Teaching Fellow in Anatomy
School of Primary Care, Population Sciences and Medical Education
Faculty of Medicine
University of Southampton, UK

Dr Scott Border is a Principal Teaching Fellow in Anatomy who has just completed a 4-year term as Deputy Head of Medical Education in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton. He is a Fellow of The Anatomical Society and the current Chair of its Education Committee. Scott is also a Senior Fellow of Advance Higher Education. In 2019 he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for his innovative work and impact in the field of anatomy education.

At Southampton, Scott has developed a thriving and internationally renowned centre of excellence for clinical neuroanatomy education that has served to vertically integrate the subject within the medical curriculum. He is driven through his passion for working in genuine partnership with students which reflects all aspects and levels of academic engagement.

Scott has become a leading expert on the efficacy of near-peer teaching in medical education and has published extensively, given invited keynote talks, and delivered workshops at numerous international scientific meetings. He is the founder of the prestigious undergraduate and postgraduate neuroanatomy competition which, over eight years has had a meaningful impact upon the career progression of countless UK students and junior doctors. Scott has pioneered innovative open access digital learning tools in neuroanatomy education which have been quality assured by leading learned societies and The Royal Colleges. His online platform - Soton Brain Hub now has an established global reach.

Poster