Musings on a Masters

For the past year, Avraam Tapinos, Jamie Weaver, and Maria Jakobsdottir, three postdocs in the Wedge group, have been working closely with David to develop a unit for the University of Manchester’s new MSc in Transformative Oncology, spearheaded by Dr Suzanne Johnson. The programme is intended for students with a science background, clinicians, allied health professionals, and individuals working in related subject areas who want to up-skill in oncology. This course aims to provide students with both practical skills and a broad knowledge of tumour biology, cancer genomics, early detection, personalised medicine, and the principles of different treatment approaches, maintaining a focus on diversity of patients and genomes throughout. Built from the ground up, the programme takes an innovative approach to flexible online learning, enabling students from all over the world to complete either a PGCert, PGDip, or MSc while still working full time. For more information on the course, please visit the course website or contact the Transformative Oncology MSc course adviser.

The Wedge group “TransOnc Team” have been working on Unit 2 of the course, titled “Cancer is an Individualised Disease”. The unit covers a broad range of topics, introducing students to the heterogeneous and individual nature of cancer genomes, the techniques commonly employed to study cancer genomes, complications introduced by underlying health issues and lifestyle factors, and how all of these features relate to cancer treatment and outcome. During the development process the team worked closely with Nadine Morgan, a brilliant e-Learning Technologist specialising in online learning, to create engaging teaching content. The team has also reached out to a number of world-renowned cancer researchers who have developed a series of short lectures for the course.

We reached out to the TransOnc Team in the lead up to the launch of Unit 2 to hear about their experiences developing part of the new MSc, and how it differs from their previous experiences, both as teachers and students. Read on for an interview with the three developers, as well as some behind the scenes photos.

Interview

Did you have any previous teaching experience before joining the Unit 2 development team?

Avraam: I had some teaching experience in the sense of delivering a module for a college in Cyprus over zoom, but it was more similar to the didactic form where I had slides, presenting everything on zoom. I would ask for questions and no one asked questions, it seems like students didn’t engage and I had to push them to reply. But this is a new version of online teaching, new techniques, new ways of doing stuff which I hadn’t done before. It was the first time for me.

Jamie: Yeah, I think that’s the same, pretty much the same story. So I’ve done quite a lot of teaching for medical students as part of training, there’s tons of that involved in it, and that is always face-to-face and has been bedside with patients and examples, and quite a lot of didactic teaching too, on various different topics. I also do, for Miriam Smith who runs a Masters in cancer genetics, three lectures for her on that, and that’s purely didactic as well. Or at least the way I’ve chosen to do it, [haha]! That’s three “just talking” lectures, and fortunately, as I started doing that last year, it’s been face to face, so that’s been quite nice as I quite like doing teaching. So this was quite different and I struggled a bit to come to terms with not blocking, as medical teaching is very didactic and there are loads of individual facts to learn rather than concepts, so I struggled a bit with the idea of having to deliver it in a different way, in shorter bite-size chunks. I think Nadine and Suz were very helpful with that actually, describing how to do it, and actually following what you guys have done and the other modules, because I was just like “Oh, I’ll give three 40 minute lectures”.
[laughter]

Avraam: Yeah, what I got from you is that in medicine it makes sense to be more factual, and you know, you have to learn this, this, and this, at least that’s how I was seeing teaching in this previous thing. It’s basically you teach students the concept, they don’t need to know all the details. It’s not like you have the life of someone in your hands, they need to understand the concept and maybe expand that or the way they’re thinking - the two worlds, you know, are much more different.

Jamie: Yeah

Avraam: So it makes more sense for you to want to be more didactic given your experience, whereas it was easier, at least for my part, to not have all these details. You’re just introducing the concept, giving some examples, and then they can expand on that, whereas in your case it’s very different isn’t it?

Jamie: It is interesting, I mean my undergraduate training was at Cambridge and that follows the natural sciences curriculum there, which is basic science, and then we go on to do essentially a natural sciences degree in our third year so we’re all in together, and a lot of that was quite didactic as well. You know, you just sit through like three hours of lectures on chicken MHC, and then they’re like “now read these 8 papers on chicken MHC”, and I guess those lectures, looking back on it, that course wasn’t very well structured in terms of there was no conceptual thing to learn to, it was just sort of like you learned to be a good scientist just by brutality. It was just like “here’s more information than you can possibly deal with”, every week, at the end of the week, it would be like “read 9 papers”, and as an undergraduate that was just crazy!

Maria: Overwhelming

Jamie: I don’t think it’s the way it’s done anywhere else at all. Or it probably is in some universities… just learning by brutality so you became a good scientist by just reading huge quantities. Because that was the outcome from that, just people to put into PhD programmes, and the doctors just happened to tag along to it. Yeah, in medicine it’s relatively simple facts, but just a lot of them.

Maria: Well for me, my only teaching experience was in secondary school I volunteered at the International School of Iceland, just helping kids learn to read. So, very much no teaching before this. Just teaching kids languages.

Jamie: I guess languages are always quite some didactic, like memorise this list of works, and some conceptual, like this is how you put together a sentence.

Maria: It was mostly just tutoring, helping kids learn a bit of Icelandic, because it was an international school, so English was the spoken language in the school, but obviously there were kids coming in at sort of 5 years old with no English and no Icelandic, I happened to speak German, and there was a German speaking family, so I helped them learn a little English and Icelandic. It was more just so they would have someone who understood them.

Jamie: Yeah

What was your favourite part of working on the course?

Jamie: I think my favourite bit of it was… obviously working with Nadine! [laughter]

Maria: Yeah, Nadine’s a star!

Jamie: She is awesome, so yeah. I guess how much support we’ve had in terms of developing this kind of different way of looking at things, and the different way of teaching. The opportunities to look at how different people are doing it, and figuring out these novel ways of teaching.

Maria: Yeah

Jamie: I guess as a sort of evidence-based clinician though, I am intrigued to see what the feedback will be, especially across the different modules, because there is different structure to them all. I suppose I’ve gone with more of a video-based thing with lots of text afterwards, and we’ll see what’s actually best for the learners. The opportunity to just do different things with it has been cool.

Avraam: That will be interesting to see the feedback. I was looking at the other modules as well; some of them are, you know, have a theme from the start to the end, whereas seem to have a blended approach.

Jamie: Across the whole six weeks?

Avraam: Yeah, we have some differences. For me, enjoyable things were working with Nadine, she was a star, as you said. She was really helpful and she was doing stuff that I was thinking was our responsibility, she was like “no no, I’ll do that”. You know, coming in contact with people who are outside of research in the university, it was the first time for me. Coming in contact with people from different backgrounds. Also, because I’m relatively new in cancer genomics, learning lots of new things, I had to read a lot to gather the material. I have learned stuff that helped me with my research. Getting that knowledge, because I had to read different websites about the NCBI, other cancer organisations, and stuff to learn some of the things that I wanted to include. Yeah, expanding my knowledge.

Maria: Yeah, I think much like Avraam I really enjoyed that. Kind of going back to some of the basics, reading up a bit more about them, and expanding my view of cancer biology. And I also just really enjoyed creating content, and again, working with Nadine.

Jamie: Yeah, she’s fantastic.

Maria: She’s been leading us and holding our hands through this

Jamie: And like her being able to take what you wrote or an idea of it and putting it together in a nice way, and being like “oh yeah, that works, and looks good!”

Maria: Yeah!

Jamie: I think even for the bit that I’d done there, even though I’d done quite a lot of frailty in my research, done cancer genomics, then frailty for a bit, then come back to cancer genomics in between, that was really helpful to me as well actually. Just going back through it. Even for the clinical stuff, just the level of detail you have to go through to get it for these things, and thinking of the additional papers and being like “oh yeah, this is really interesting”. That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of that

Avraam: For me, I didn’t realise it until doing it, I remember there was, back in the day, a few years ago there was a lecturer saying “I love teaching students, especially undergrads, you have to explain them all the details, and sometimes it’s like A-ha! An idea for research!”.

Jamie: Yeah

Avraam: Sometimes it’s something very fundamental that you forget about, but if you have to teach it, you might have some new ideas come in your head.

Was there anything that surprised you?

Jamie: Maybe how difficult it would be to figure out what would make good content in this delivery setting? I thought it would be easier just to put all the text together and everything in one big set, but when you’re presenting it to people, you know that you’ll be able to immediately get feedback from them about if they’re struggling with it, and so they won’t suffer in silence for the whole hour and you can see, you can watch their faces and be like “okay, I think we need to go back over”.

Avraam: And also, if you’re teaching by delivering the lecture, if they have any questions, you can answer it, whereas here you have to anticipate everything and put content in. So you don’t know if they don’t understand something or not, whereas if you’re having a face-to-face and you forget to mention something, you can straight away put that in your talk if they ask you, whereas here you have to anticipate everything.

Jamie: Yeah

Maria: I think, just how long it took. I knew it was going to take a long time, so I tried to front-load it, but I didn’t realise just how much time it was going to take to generate all the content and decide what goes into the course.

Jamie: Yeah

Avraam: With online teaching, at least the way that we do it, you have to try to cover every possible outcome.

Maria: Yeah, you really have to get into the details

Jamie: I think this has maybe taken me 10 times longer than my other lectures that I wrote. So I think that I wrote the other three lectures on my topic, and again, something that I knew reasonably well about cancer causing mutations or, you know, environmental causes of cancer, that was three lectures, so like a week’s worth of stuff, maybe a week and a half, and this has taken maybe 10 or 15 times longer. Like months of it, just sitting down with it, going through it, figuring out the lectures, making sure it’s detailed.

Avraam: And everything that’s written down, that it’s accurate, not ambiguous, that it cannot be mistaken. I think Nadine said online teaching, the way that we’re doing it, it takes 7 times more time than traditional teaching.

Jamie: Better run for 7 years longer! [laughter]

What did you find most difficult?

Maria: I think for me it was the multiple choice questions. I really really struggled coming up with them.

Avraam: Yeah, that

Maria: The questions and the answers

Avraam: One of the difficulties that I’ve had was trying to fit the design of the module with my research. But yeah, content specific or module specific, I think it’s the multiple choice questions. Like “does that sound really stupid?” “is it too simplistic?”

Jamie: Yeah, “is it too easy?”

Avraam: “Is it too obvious?”

Jamie: MCQs, I’ve done a lot of MCQs before, so I’ve done thousands over the years, and literally was sitting an MCQ exam during or while I was writing this, so I’ve got a good outline of it, which is why all my MCQs are structured like the MCQ exam with case based examples. The hardest part for me was recording lectures. I think that was new. I never have a script when I’m teaching, I’m always quite ad hoc and know the information quite well and talk about it and tend to be quite fluent and adapt it to what’s going on with the students and how they’re going, and so I give the same lectures every few months to the medics at the hospital about different cancer types, and it’s always a bit different each time. I was surprised how much I needed a script actually, to make it clear and concise in this setting, and to keep it to time. So yeah, that was a bit of a shock. You can’t ad lib it as much.

Maria: I think what I also found difficult was figuring out where to pitch the content, what level, because we have quite a broad audience of students from different backgrounds. Knowing what we could reasonably assume was prior knowledge and we had to cover and what extra resources we’d have to provide.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s a good point as well.

Avraam: Maybe I haven’t thought about that, because I was feeling like an outsider coming to cancer genomics, so maybe I haven’t experienced this because as an outsider I was trying to develop this knowledge. Sometimes I was feeling that way “is that too simplistic?”, but yeah.

How is this course different to courses that you’ve attended or your education?

Maria: Jamie, I guess you touched on didactic lectures earlier.

Jamie: I did, yeah, everything I’ve ever had has been very didactic. Just a lot of information heavy, just having to go to the lectures and having to sit down afterwards and remember the lectures and going to a supervision and doing the same thing again and after you’ve done it three or four times it kind of settles in. But it was just bulk factual information, because that’s what, I mean medicine is conceptual, there are concepts to it, but you can’t be a good doctor without also having a huge background knowledge of just random, very easy to remember, facts that you could teach anybody. Whereas this is a bit more conceptual, and a different style of learning, so it’ll be interesting to see how it will work, and whether it could be adapted to do a more conceptual course. I deep down think that for something like medicine everybody always just wants all the information to be coalesced into one easy to get to place, whereas this is more like exposing people to hopefully stimulate their knowledge so that they get excited and go read more. They can then choose to do different bits and pieces because we’re not saying to them “you have to come back to us with these facts”, we’re just saying to them “you have to have an overview” and I guess the assessments kind of capture that in the reflective portfolio. We’re aiming for a broader knowledge, so they’ll all take different things away from it. Whereas every course I’ve gone to before was like “you need to all come away knowing these thousand facts”.

Avraam: For me it was again didactic. Always had lectures, tutorials, and labs or programming and stuff, but never experienced the online learning “here’s the material and you can explore this aspect and this aspect if you want more”. It was just lectures and someone talking to us, giving us the information and facts, us reading papers again, then going in the tutorial and discussing those papers or whatever, and then labs just coding, that’s my background, computer science, and doing a project, but yeah, it’s never like that, it’s an interesting approach of doing things, and you know, it seems to be the modern way of teaching.

Maria: For me, I’ve had a mixture of things, so I’ve done some online learning done some in person learning. I kind of found it changed as I went through the years of university, in first year they’d pack 500 students into one lecture theatre and somebody lectures at you for an hour or two and you go and do whatever, and it’s all very disjointed. With the online things that I’ve done it’s still very much been “here’s a lecture, here’s some text” there’s never any sort of interactive activities or different ways of approaching the content, so I think that’s what’s nice about this course. One of the things that stands out in my education that we kind of tried to bring to this course is a module that I did in my final year of pharmacology, which was very much based around trying to give you practical skills, or how to learn to approach data, so one of the exercises was they gave us a dossier of trials data for a drug and we had to work through that and work out which drug was the one candidate that you would take forward. Which I thought was really good, because it was more applicable rather than just watching a lecture and reading some text. So we tried to do that in some of the exercises in this course as well.

Jamie: That sounds like a great thing to have done

Maria: It was, it really stands out, really enjoyed that.

What are your hopes for the students on this course?

Maria: I mostly just hope that they find it interesting, and that they find it useful; that it sparks their interest in something else.

Jamie: I hope I’ve put together enough in the way that it - our module’s quite hard in that it’s so broad, it’s such a big topic across the three different things that we’re doing. The concept of cancer being an individualised disease is fine, but it’s just massive, and ours is so diverse compared to other modules and what’s going on in them, where it starts from and what it ends up with in terms of comorbidities all the way through to genetics and exposures, but I hope that what we’ve done is we’ve got a framework to build on so that we’ve given them access to key references and that they could come away from this now and for any of these topics start working towards doing something relevant locally, in a clinical setting or in a job or a PhD, with a real focus because they’ve been like “oh, I have all that information that I need to really start thinking about how we’d implement frailty or thinking about how we’d identify mutational exposures, or you know, environmental exposures in patients”. That it’s all there for them to build on so they can look back on these notes in like 5 years and be like “that’s really useful”. That’s what I hope.

Avraam: Basically, you know, find the content interesting, engage with it, and also just broaden their understanding of the topic and if they find something interesting, focus towards that. I hope we give them enough material to focus on the direction and that they want to go expand a bit further and understand the different techniques that are being used for the individual treatments, and the big umbrella being that everyone is different so we have to explore different avenues, but also how new techniques like signatures might be used in the future, or have the potential to be used in that aspect of care. I don’t know if it will, it seems like we’re going towards that direction but we still have many years for that, but it might be useful in the future - we’ll see. Just intrigue them.

Unit 2 of the Transformative Oncology MSc will run from late November 2022 until the end of January 2023. We’ll check back in with the TransOnc team once the course has finished to hear more about their experiences delivering an online masters, so keep your eyes peeled!