Tom Chanarin presents at ASME’s Annual Scholarship Meeting

This year, Tom Chanarin completed an intercalated degree (iBSc) taking a year out of his medical studies to focus on medical education.

With the support of his supervisory team, Dorottya Cserzo (CUREMeDE), Julie Browne (School of Medicine), and Aurora Goodwin (Centre for Language and Communication Research), he examined Effective discourse strategies in medical video lectures. His dissertation received a first, and his presentation at the annual ASME (Advancing Scholarship in Medical Education) conference was selected as a prestigious oral presentation.

Background and aim of the project: Online lectures have become pivotal in medical education. Previous studies of medical video lectures have focused on how the students receive information, rather than on delivery. This study aimed to identify effective discourse strategies when conducting medical video lectures to improve engagement.

Methods: A literature review was conducted to identify what techniques lecturers can use in online lectures, such as signalling gestures to focus the student’s gaze. A sample of three didactic online medical lectures from Cardiff University School of Medicine was purposively selected.

Data analysis: The study used Multimodal Discourse Analysis to identify specific discourse strategies and patterns of use. The three video lectures were transcribed verbatim. The videos were analysed using NVivo Pro 12.

Findings: Tom focused on the relationship between the text displayed on the slides and the speech of the lecturers. He found that lecturers created coherence by aligning their speech with the text written on the slides, utilising three different strategies. He argued that conscious use of these strategies can improve the quality of video lectures.