Clare Thomson is a Learning Technologist in the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast. Over eight years she has created the Medical Education Portal, a VLE ‘alternative’ meeting the complex needs of the undergraduate medical curriculum. The importance of visual design combined with usability and accessibility underpinned the development of the space. She was awarded a Queen’s University Belfast Teaching Award in 2014 for this work.

Her interests focus on student engagement, advocating the need for human presence within online environments/spaces and exploring how creativity can be integrated into formal learning. She has worked on HEA and Jisc funded projects on OER, deaf awareness, OSCE training and student engagement. An ALT member Clare is awaiting the outcome of her CMALT portfolio submission. She is also a student on the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Digital Education.

This week’s topic was inspired by discussions during the #LTHEchat 63. Students begin their university journey on our campuses, physical and virtual, at induction events. Topics include; academic essay writing, plagiarism, referencing and information literacy to name but a few. However, technology has significantly added to this list with the need to add the Virtual Learning Systems, communication channels, eportfolios, student information systems and e-assessment software to the list. Recently, this has widened even further to cover online identities, social media and professionalism, copyright and critical analysis of online resources and information.

In this LTHEchat we will put induction under the microscope and explore participants’ thoughts on implementing different strategies to ease our students into higher education.

See you Wednesday 23rd November, same time, same place. 8-9PM (GMT) #LTHEchat

The storify is available here. 

The LTHEchat team