Q&A with Dr Jamie Harle

Dr Jamie Harle (Senior Teaching Fellow, UCL Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering) was awarded at this year’s Provost’s Teaching Awards for Leadership and Impact. He is programme director for the campus and distance learning routes of the MSc in Physics and Engineering in Medicine, the largest and longest running Master’s course in the field in Europe.

What are you working on at the moment?

As well as day-to-day course matters, such as online project presentations taking place today, I am working on a project in conjunction with UCL Careers, UCLH and our department’s researchers to develop an online portal linking academic resources to related employment options for our students. The department has been running a series of lunchtime talks which have been filmed and edited and we seek a means to link this exciting research work at UCL to information for our students on how to follow such career paths.

Longer term, I am looking at ways we can reinvigorate and innovate our teaching within the department. It’s an essential activity and increasingly we need to consider how we facilitate flexible learning as more of our students choose to study in this way. Many of my students study whilst overseas or part-time as they work within industry, so thinking about how we package our teaching for them as a growing cohort of learners needs to be a priority.

This also means that it’s vital to integrate more scenario-based learning opportunities into our teaching so that our campus and online students can work together and learn form one another’s experiences. A team project module I am designing over the summer will engage students, overseas and campus, to work together on a design and project management task.

What advice would you give to someone looking to develop the way they teach?

Having taught in universities for ten years, I think that the most important thing you can do is to develop a style that matches your personality. I enjoy ‘pushing boundaries’ so I tend to reflect that in the teaching methods I adopt. I also view things ‘top down’ - I see the bigger picture first and then decide on the details working from that but I know colleagues who prefer do the opposite and that’s fine too; teaching in a way that matches who you are.

Also, you need to find role models and learn from them; are there any skills, techniques and methods that you might be able to adopt by seeing how they work? There could be more opportunities to do this at UCL, through scholarship being a more recognised activity for Teaching Fellows, so that they can see many more practices specific to their field, for example in industry or hospitals.

What piece of technology do you find invaluable in your teaching?

I use the programme ‘Textwall’ very often in my lectures; I give students a number to text at any time with any questions they may have and this goes through to a website which I have access to. Submissions are anonymous and I spend the first ten minutes of the lecture answering all of them. If they require a more personal answer I will remind students of my office hours or to email me. It’s easy to set up and not too expensive for staff and the charges for students to send in the question are minimal or are often included in their phone bundles.

It’s beneficial in a number of ways. Firstly, students may not feel comfortable asking a question in front of peers or to me directly so this allows them the opportunity to ask anything at any point with the knowledge that I will answer it. Questions can be academic or practical – as long as it relates to the course, the platform is open to them.

Most usefully, it also allows me to find out what topics students are struggling with so I can recap or explain a concept in further detail. I also find it a helpful way of getting feedback on the lecture – if a point is raised regularly I’ll know where to focus in future.

How do you expect higher education to change in the next five years?

I’d expect there will be a lot of change, one key area may be the creation of formal partnerships between UK and overseas institutions. Departments and courses will most likely need to establish links with industry or higher education partners, often overseas, to help facilitate more demand for placements or local learning. The overseas market is a good example of this. UCL has a large cohort of overseas graduate taught students, and increasingly, I can see UCL partnering up with overseas universities to deliver packages that are part-London, part-local in delivery. This is more so for ‘hands-on’ disciplines, like engineering or clinical fields.

What achievement are you most proud of?

My recent Provost’s Teaching Award win has been recognition of the leadership role I have taken in a department which is increasingly valuing teaching and learning. It’s evidence that there has been a change of culture in the department during my time here; teaching staff have more freedom, responsibility, the power to steer teaching to suit the diversity of our students and importantly, the ability to contribute towards the teaching strategy of the department.

Professor Andrew Eder (UCL Life Learning) asks “how might you or your department increase short course activity over the next 18 months?”

Our new Biomedical Engineering BSc has been designed to include a range of diverse and innovative modules which may work as individual short courses to specific audiences and markets. However we’d need to consider these audiences further and how to best target them.

What question would you like to pose the next interviewee?

If you are in a teaching specialist role, how do you keep up to date with trends and innovations in the field you teach? Is it through scholarship activity, such as placements or otherwise, through research? UCL needs to keep its teachers engaged and informed of forefronts in their field, and I wonder how this is done by others.