Authors

Pritee Rajput
Subject Leader for Science and Health, Morley College

Adam Beral
Head of Curriculum for Health, Education and Science, Morley College

In the spring of 2021, the teaching team supporting aspiring midwives to complete their Access to Higher Education Diploma faced a familiar dilemma. With teaching and learning taking place entirely online, how could they best support students to produce evidence of their understanding of the role of the midwife, as well as the code of practice that governs them?

In previous years, this assessment had taken the form of a presentation, which students delivered to their classmates in order to develop their public speaking skills alongside providing evidence to achieve the assessment criteria. However, whilst students were working remotely from each other, Subject Leader for Science and Health, Pritee Rajput, didn’t think this method of assessment would work as well.

Knowing that International Women’s Day was approaching, Pritee began thinking that there was an opportunity to create something that generated the evidence required whilst also highlighting inspirational midwives from history. With this in mind, Pritee approached colleagues at Morley Radio and together they came up with the idea of creating a podcast.

Once she was certain the technology would support the initiative, Pritee presented the idea to her eight Midwifery students. The innovative approach to assessment was enthusiastically welcomed by all of them, who not only relished the creation of the podcast but also set about designing a supplementary presentation to provide authentic and reliable evidence towards their assessment.

On 8 March 2021, the students’ presentation highlighting famous midwives was rehashed by the Morley College marketing team and published on the At Home with Morley website to coincide with International Women’s Day.

The podcast, which began as a way of evidencing assessment criteria, soon took on a life of its own as the students realised not only how much fun it was to create, but also how impactful the spoken word can be as a means of spreading information.

You can listen to the podcast on the Morley Radio website.

Adam Beral, Head of Curriculum for Health, Education and Science at Morley College’s North Kensington Centre, said of the project:

'This was a real success of autonomous learning. The experience kept the group motivated whilst working remotely from each other. They worked collaboratively online to write their own script, record the podcast and design their own presentations. The fact that it also generated material that will educate people about the important part women have played in medical history is a wonderful addition that I was thrilled to see.'