Interview with Denise Foulkes- Senior Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University
Hello. My name is Denise Foulkes, and I have worked at Sheffield Hallam since 2015 as a senior lecturer on the Diagnostic Radiography undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. I also worked at a local Trust for many years as a general and then a Reporting Radiographer.
Due to a lack of access to real patient cases in the UK for teaching, I was introduced by one of the CMRAD Team to the platform after feeling frustrated that there was only access to low quality jpeg images available via the internet for teaching.
We proudly use the platform to showcase the teaching standards on open days, during course talks, and for undergraduate and postgraduate advanced practitioner teaching and training across multiple professions.
Here at Sheffield Hallam, we have many healthcare courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level study as well as a growing number of degree apprentices. Sheffield Hallam was awarded Gold status in the recent Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
The ease of using the platform has meant that the whole team has engaged in using CMRAD for their teaching sessions as well as incorporating the platform into self-directed study for the students to access as pre and post session activities. The beauty of CMRAD is that it closely mirrors PACS, which the students see on a daily basis on clinical placement.
Our 3rd year students take part in Research, Education and Leadership placement blocks (REL). The education placement involved groups of 3rd year students who came into the university and designed teaching activities that included image interpretation using CMRAD. The REL placements were showcased at the UKIO 2024, and one of the education students won the CMRAD case of the day quiz.
Previous to CMRAD, students had to study image evaluation from PowerPoint presentations, PDFs of powerpoints, and computer based quizzes via Blackboard, with zero image manipulation functionality. Many with limited access to devices really struggled to engage, and we all felt the ‘death by PowerPoint.’
CMRAD transformed this overnight, and the students have loved being able to work collaboratively or alone using their accounts to access collections of images and mimic doing case lists in clinical practice. They love the monthly webinars provided by CMRAD, and they are great for CPD for both staff and students.
We also piloted running an entire online day course for physiotherapists, solely through CMRAD, it was so easy to add recorded lectures and resources all in one place. The online application has been excellent. Students can access it on any device.
Prior to implementing CMRAD, accessing DICOM images for teaching presented challenges, necessitating the use of more traditional methods such as PowerPoint and JPEGs. The previous approach was static and limited in interactivity, making it difficult to simulate real-life diagnostic scenarios. Adopting CMRAD introduced a dynamic, interactive learning environment that is simple to set up and start teaching as nothing needs to be installed locally.
We are part of an imaging consortium but were denied access to cases or images for teaching students. Some other online platforms had access to cases but had little functionality for the students to access. This platform ticks all of our boxes and has elevated the student experience and improved online and online engagement. We can easily manage playlists of cases to use during teaching sessions with a built in high quality viewer that includes an array of image manipulation tools and presenter tools to highlight anatomy and pathology.
As a team of tutors, we have noticed better attendance at the face to face seminars, better test results that demonstrate student improvements, and high levels of engagement on and off campus.
‘I truly believe that using this has helped our students to meet their competencies ahead of qualification and enhanced their on-campus, off-campus, and clinical learning.’ ‘I remember when I first used it during an on campus seminar session, I had a class waiting outside and could not get the class that I was teaching to stop work and finish the session; they just wanted five more minutes,’ Denise at SHU.
Initially, I was completely sold on CMRAD, but I invited my team to observe sessions where it was used. Seeing the platform in action made them see the possibilities that it could bring, and they, too, started to use it.
There have been a number of developments during the time we have been using the platform. We are particularly excited about the quiz module and being able to test students.
Denise Foulkes, Senior Lecturer in Diagnostic Radiography at Sheffield Hallam University. Postgraduate (distance learning) Course Leader. Reporting Radiographer.
Reviewed by: Rebecca Johnson on October 16, 2024