Year 1 foundation results remain strong amidst COVID adaptations
Students supporting each other’s learning over Zoom chat. Professors getting to grips with captioning software. It’s been a different start to the year but if the foundation exam results are anything to go by, we’re doing a pretty great job.
Professor Mark Boyd couldn't be prouder of the foundation exam results for our Year 1 student doctors. Professor of Molecular Oncology and lead on Foundation Block for years 1 and 2, Professor Boyd is delighted with such strong results despite the adaptations required due to COVID.
It’s just one example of the continued success we have been seeing across the school thanks to the resilience, adaptability and commitment to teaching and learning in these unprecedented times.
“It’s really been such a spectacular team effort,” he said as he guided me through just what it means to deliver lectures during online learning. Because now this involves recording and distributing your material, as well as the often-mind-boggling process of managing (and correcting!) automatically generated video captions.
There’s a lot of hard work that goes into preparing your lectures and making them accessible to students.
Professor Boyd wanted to extend praise to Foundation System Lead Nikolina Vlatkovic, as well as Alistair Bond and Paul Rothwell from the Human Anatomy Resource Centre (HARC) and Neil Blake and Gerry Davies from Microbiology.
That’s only one side of the process, now come the students, and Professor Boyd has been particularly impressed with the engagement and professionalism on show. “Seeing how the students have interacted and supported each other over chat for example, during our Q&A sessions to prepare for these exams."
They have really stepped up to help one another and are already demonstrating behaviours that will be so important to them throughout their medical career: building a dialogue, working as a team, making the best decision together.
Well done to all our Year 1 student doctors for completing the foundation exams and for finding new and innovative ways of not only managing your own learning but also facilitating those of your peers.