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Peter is a university lecturer in physiological sciences. He gives roughly 15 lectures a year, runs practical classes, and supervises undergraduates, and the occasional graduate. He is also a tutor in physiological sciences at his college, where he sees 12 undergraduate pre-clinical students at least once a week throughout their first year and very frequently thereafter. He runs the non-medical physiological sciences course and teaches both medical and non-medical students.


Peter uses ICTs to aid in the administration of his teaching. He uses a departmental tutorial booking system which permits students to book slots and download relevant materials for the tutorial (e.g. reading lists). He finds the system quite ‘clumsy,’ taking a couple of hours to enter a single term’s tutorials, which he considers ‘too long’. He says ‘it’s quite tricky, more academics would use it in our department division if it was easier to enter the reading lists.’ He uses word-processing software to write all of his college reports and answers a lot of e-mail queries from students. 


Peter creates his reading lists in Word and uses a DOS-based program to store his references. He annotates his reading lists to indicate to students which readings are essential. He sporadically updates them and often adds more up-to-date references from an online medical bibliography called Medline a few days before the associated lecture. He finds linking directly to the online databases from reading lists unproductive as it stops the students learning how to use the online databases for themselves.


Peter describes the teaching of physiological sciences as primarily the teaching of facts:


  I don't know how many Latin names for different parts of the body they have to learn but it’s an awful lot, and when they've done that they have to learn the same number of Latin or Greek names for different chemical intermediates and other things.


Peter feels that ICT could pose as a solution to easing this burden, making it ‘more fun.’ Peter takes this concept into his lectures and uses power-points containing humorous cartoons included to ‘liven up’ the lecture, saying that ‘it makes them remember the boring stuff.’


Peter expresses that he strongly believes in active teaching - ‘getting them involved and doing things,’ although he considers this ‘not very IT-ish.’ He says that his lectures usually have a high degree of interactivity incorporating what he calls a ‘Quizzy’ (an on-the-spot mini-quiz), and debates. Peter’s perceptions of the benefits of active teaching relate to his own learning experiences:


  What do I achieve through active teaching?  My discovery of active teaching was in California when we had these mid-term exams, they had exams every three weeks, I came from England where exams were finals and were monumentally terrifying, so I approached exams far more seriously than anyone else did.  And my way of preparing, and I don’t know where I got it from, was to rewrite all my lecture notes within twenty-four hours of going to the lecture, I would boil the lecture notes down actively thinking about them and simplifying them. It was fantastically powerful, there's something about reading the notes and it goes in to your brain, and then it comes out and it goes down your hand on to the paper and you see, you move the hand with the brain and you see the words coming out, and it goes back in the other end.  It’s recycling the same things around and around.  And I did very well in those courses, in fact I was usually top by some margin.  And I insist that all my students bring me, at the end of their first week, examples of lecture notes that they have taken home and rehashed.  It’s not particularly creative, but it works like anything, it means they find out what they didn’t understand.  They may have thought they understood the lecture, but when they actually go through it and try to rephrase things, they discover that they don’t quite understand everything.  That was the one realisation of how to get an awful lot of material in to you, you know, that's one form of activity.


When considering how ICTs could be used for active teaching Peter says that ‘in terms of active teaching and interaction, well I guess that the degree of contact time the students get exposed to here reduces the need for things like discussion boards and online quizzes; they get all that from their tutorials’.


Peter has developed two major ICT projects. The first project was a course evaluation system to collect feedback from the students. Previously the system course evaluations had been done by hand:


  [I]t took an afternoon plus some to collate twenty handouts.  All the ticks, adding them up mindlessly, one, two, three, four, five, for different qualities of lecture, and then doing the means and standard deviations in Excel and then writing a report for the next term...there had to be a better way.


Equally unsatisfied with the functionality in the institutional VLE (‘It took four days and was horrendous’), Peter decided to create a new system. With previous programming experience and ‘wanting to learn a higher level Windows-based language’ he developed the course evaluation tool as a project to teach himself a new programming language. The tool has been used to collect feedback a number of times and Peter believes that the course feedback has improved as a result:

  You just go click, click, click, click, click, four minutes and you can write, there's lots and lots of boxes for comments, and for some reason it really attracts comments… I’m terribly pleased with it because it really is instant and it really has worked


The second project Peter developed was a simulation called ‘TeaLeaves’. The simulation is designed to encourage students to look ‘creatively’ at respiratory and cardiovascular traces obtained from human subjects exercising on a bicycle, and to ask and answer physiological questions about relationships between the behaviour of the lungs and heart. It is called TeaLeaves because it is intended to help students see things that may (and occasionally may not) be there, and to test predictions about what they see. Like the course evaluation project, TeaLeaves addresses a specific problem face by Peter in his teaching:


  There are many many fewer practical classes than there used to be, it’s too expensive and when the med student numbers went up from 100 – 150 it was decreed that we could no longer run practical classes for any one after the first year, there just wasn’t enough space or money. And a part of what you get out of a practical class is putting things together, building equipment and making things work which has gone. But the other part is looking at the experimental results that you have got and saying what the hell do they mean and that’s what this is doing. This is taking real experimental results rather than computer generated ones, with all their short comings, with all their noise, and encouraging people to look more closely at them and to find out what’s going on.