Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education

This part-time, Master’s level programme is designed for healthcare professionals involved in medical education and training. There are growing expectations that those with educational roles and responsibilities should engage in professional development activity to enable them to model and uphold the highest standards.

This programme provides a sound foundation for clinicians and clinical academics who support undergraduate medical students and/or postgraduate trainees’ learning in Higher and Professional Education settings, including the clinical workplace.

The programme has been designed in collaboration with clinicians, for clinicians. As a result, the structure of the programme allows students flexibility over module choice, minimising the potential for service disruption and allowing students to develop areas of expertise relevant to their role responsibilities.

This programme aims to produce graduates who:

• create welcoming, safe and purposeful learning environments
• design and deliver engaging and effective teaching, learning and assessment activities
• have purposeful, developmental conversations with learners that support their personal and professional career development
• have a sound grasp of key educational theories and concepts, drawing on these to develop and critique their own and others’ educational practice
• adopt a critically reflective and reflexive approach to medical education and training

Teaching & Assessment

This is a Distance Learning course, delivered via our Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle. All modules contain a literature-based assessment activity and students are expected to read widely and critically throughout the programme. All modules require written reflections as self-directed task-based activity; there are a number of self-directed tasks which require students to design, implement and evaluate authentic clinical teaching/supervision activities with one or more learners in a range of contexts.

In addition, each of the three modules has an assessment task which requires students to review their own practice and suggest changes with a rationale. In the core module this is based on tutor observation of teaching, while in the optional units, this is based on recorded sessions that students self-critique, as well as further teaching observations. We see feedback as a central part of the learning process.

This structure ensures that students can personalise their programme to align with their professional interests and development needs, whilst still meeting the professional standards of two accrediting bodies, AdvanceHE and the Academy of Medical Educators, and those of the GMC.