Visiting Professorship Programme

The workshop trained faculty in constructing high quality OBAs to assess higher order thinking skills that measure application, analysis, and synthesis, not just recall. The participants learned to design a clear, focused stem with effective distractors and questions that meet all the quality indicators.

This academic plenary explored the concept of soft power and its critical role in influencing public policy. The session covers the definition of soft power, its distinction from hard power, and its historical significance. The audience gained insights about the mechanisms and tools of soft power, including the role of culture, media, and education. The plenary highlighted how soft power has been effectively used to achieve policy goals. Additionally, the plenary also addressed the challenges and ethical considerations of using soft power, emphasizing the importance of transparency and integrity and practical strategies for leveraging soft power in various sectors such as healthcare and education.

This workshop offers an in-depth exploration of various approaches to standard setting for written tests. Participants examined methods such as the Ebel and Angoff methods, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each. The workshop emphasizes how to effectively apply these methods to establish defensible cut scores, ensuring fair and valid assessments. By discussing the relative merits of each approach, participants gained the insights needed to make informed decisions on the best practices for their specific contexts, ultimately enhancing the integrity and reliability of their testing processes.

This 4-days course covers a general introduction to leadership including leadership theories, personality types, and values. A selection of local HPE leaders were invited to speak to the participants about their leadership journey. Action Learning sets was conducted on a leadership issue that the participants bring, and have a session called leadership in action, where participants undertake a leadership exercise and give and receive feedback. There were also a group task on “Digital Transformation” and how they would use their knowledge of leadership to bring change. On the last day, all participants presented their leadership journey, reflecting on what they have learned.

This academic plenary will explore the significant gender gaps in leadership within health professions. The session will provide an overview of current disparities, analysing recent trends and the systemic, cultural, and personal barriers that hinder advancement in healthcare leadership. Discussions will highlight the real-world impact of these gaps on healthcare outcomes and organizational effectiveness, supported by personal stories and statistical insights. The audience will gain practical strategies to promote gender equality, including best practices and policies, the importance of mentorship and professional networks, and successful case studies of initiatives that have reduced gender disparities.

This inspirational career talk is designed for junior doctors and graduating students to equip them with essential tools for navigating the dynamic field of medicine.

Participants explored on:

• Understanding Change: Recognizing the unprecedented shifts in healthcare delivery, technology, and socio-economic factors that are shaping the medical profession.
• Embracing Uncertainty: Viewing uncertainty as an opportunity for innovation and professional growth rather than a barrier.
• Building Resilience: Learning the importance of resilience in overcoming challenges, including practical strategies to cultivate inner strength and adaptability.
• Career Development Strategies: Discussing mentorship and further education as key components for career advancement
• Fostering a Growth Mindset: Encouraging a lifelong learning attitude to continuously evolve in response to the changing healthcare landscape.

An assessment blueprint is a detailed plan outlining the specific assessments for a course or programme. It can be a a useful roadmap for assessment alignment with learning outcomes at the programme, module, or test/exam level. This workshop aims to equip faculty with the skills to create effective assessment blueprints at the test/exam level that align with learning outcomes and ensure fair and valid assessments. Participants explored the components of assessment blueprints, learn how to design effective assessment items and address issues such as bias and fairness.

This intermediate to advanced level workshop is designed to enhance participants’ skills in creating and refining OSCE stations and evaluating candidate performance with precision. Building on foundational knowledge, the workshop provides a deeper exploration of OSCE station development and introduces advanced techniques for performance assessment.

Many professionals who have successful careers often share that they would not have gotten there without the advice and guidance of other wiser men and women. These people act as their mentors, supporting them in developing new skills, navigating political environments, challenging ideas, and expanding network. Nevertheless, mentoring does not always guarantee success as it depends on the mentor, the mentee as well as their mentoring relationship. In this plenary, the benefits of mentoring, the essential elements and other influencing factors (eg. Gender, organizational context) for its success are discussed.

The pursuit of scholarly activities such as research, presentation and publication in health professions education facilitates the personal and professional growth as educators. The discussion on Boyer’s model of scholarship, Glassick’s standards for effective scholarship and how educators can craft a career as scholars was very meaningful and an eye-opening. Most pertinent among the activities were communicating research results and findings, reporting implementation and evaluation of innovations and synthesizing the literature on a given topic through effective presentations and manuscript writing. The oral and written forms of scholarly presentations, including publications, require a clear, systematic, purposeful and rigorous approach to have a significant impact on other educators or the field. The workshop was very engaging and supported the health professions educators in enhancing their presentation style and writing for scholarship skills.

Bedside teaching is seen as one of the most important modalities in teaching a variety of clinical skills important for the medical profession, but its effective use is declining as recent clinical teaching and learning is shifting away from the bedside. However, the value of bedside teaching is very much important as it has been shown to improve students’ diagnostic skills, provide students with authentic cases and most importantly to build therapeutic relationships with patients. As bedside teaching is still relevant in HPE, a strategy needs to be devised to ensure the relevancy and effectiveness of bedside teaching. There has been recent work that emphasizes patient engagement in bedside teaching. In addition to discussing skills for efficient and effective bedside teaching, the participants also discuss how to engage patients in these encounters in the Malaysian context.

Workplace-based learning (WBL) is well recognised as one of the most effective approaches to translating theory into practice. Numerous factors can enhance the efficacy of workplace-based learning. This workshop discussed the principles of WBL and various strategies to enhance students’ development through WBL, which is applicable to both undergraduate and postgraduate training. The workshop also discussed the developmental approach to assessment such as roles of direct observation, feedback and practice improvement through coaching, and programmatic assessment to promote assessment for learning.

The primary goal of performance assessment, in clinical and non-clinical environments, is to calibrate the gaps between expected and current performance and help the learner narrow these gaps. This goal fosters the professional development and growth of learners. Self-reflection and feedback are integral to this process, however, feedback conversations may not always be effective. Recent research defines feedback as a dynamic, bidirectional process with a focus on growth. The effectiveness depends not only on how the feedback is given but also on how it is received and accepted. This can be challenging for the feedback giver and recipient.

Higher education has been radically transformed as a consequence of globalisation and emergence of artificial intelligence technology. One example is the removal of boundaries of space and time. Policy makers and curriculum developers need to rethink the purpose of education and support mechanism for the learners to order to produce synergy and collaboration among countries, communities and individuals. Some of the issues in curriculum development include QA in dispersed sites, serving the needs and demands of many different markets as well as meeting the learning preferences of future students. Professor Richard Hays shared his thoughts and insights on curriculum development driven by value creation and efficiency enhancement, given the opportunities offered by globalisation and AI technology.

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Research and scholarship are among the roles of a teacher. To excel in these areas, one is required to engage in continual professional reflection and renewal, including active participation and interaction with the health professions education community through conferences and publications. In this workshop, the participants mapped out the research and scholarship activities and aligned them with the other functions of academics.

Assessment is an integral component of a curriculum. It is the process of making a judgment on whether the learning outcomes are achieved through a systematic collection, review and use of information. The topics covered in 1-day workshop include identifying the appropriate assessment tools, developing the assessment blueprint, standard setting and assessment psychometrics.