In 2020 MERU was able to support 23 submissions from Imperial, including 8 student presentations. Unlike most other online conferences, AMEE elected to go entirely virtual and each registrant found themselves in (sometimes uncertain) control of their own avatar in a virtual world. This posed certain challenges – “walking” past friends and colleagues you didn’t recognise, trying to hold conversations with colleagues who had abandoned their avatars to go for coffee, and suddenly find yourself flying away unexpectedly, having inadvertently touched the wrong key whilst trying to jot down a few notes.

Despite these challenges, MERU had a good conference, delivering a masterclass on student engagement, with fellow holders of an ASPIRE award for student engagement from the University of Minho, and supporting a wonderful presentation on the WATCCH from Nina Dutta to name but two highlights. With so few live presentations on offer this year, it was really pleasing to see Imperial up there with the great and the good! There are too many presentations to mention everyone by name, but It was particularly pleasing to see so many of our undergraduate students sharing their work, suggesting that the future of education research will be secure.

The immediate future is looking challenging, due to the ongoing pandemic, but we can hope that in 2021, we will be able to share our work face to face. However, we can be certain and proud that whilst we may have been presenting our studies in a virtual universe in 2020, the work we shared will undoubtedly make a difference in the real world of medical education.

Once again MERU represented Imperial at the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference. As well as supporting a number of staff to attend the meeting and present their work, MERU also hosted a stand which, being conveniently located by one of the lunch queues, acted as a handy meeting point for friends and colleagues, a place to and recharge, when overcome by “conference overload” and a terrific advertisement for the range and quality of education research taking place at Imperial.

The 2019 annual scientific meeting of the Association for the Study of Medical Education (#ASMEASM2019) was held in Glasgow. It’s theme was ‘Sustainability, Transformation and Innovation’. Contributions from faculty, clinicians and students associated with Imperial College London included educational approaches to sustainable healthcare, the support needs of healthcare innovators, exploring empathy and reflective practice, novel assessment practices (OSKA tool and very short answer questions), the evaluation of a clinical reasoning simulator (practicum script), student involvement in medical education and curriculum development, role modelling and gender, approaches and impacts of faculty development for clinical teachers, quality improvement in undergraduate medical education, the hidden interprofessional curriculum, and transformational learning through humanities-based approaches.

In our largest collaborative venture to date, Imperial College London and LKCMedicine jointly ran the inaugural Transform MedEd conference 2018. This conference addressed transforming medical education through three main lenses; people, practice and policy. MERU and MERSU worked side by side in presenting posters, giving talks and leading workshops and supporting many colleagues to attend and present their work to a global audience. Although the conference was hosted in Singapore, 16 people were funded to attend by AMEE, including two of our medical students, Andy Cheng and Rain Li who presented their work on the perceived role of the medical student in the healthcare setting. 

This year we were able to fund 18 members, including many teaching fellows to travel to Basel for the annual AMEE conference, showcasing research such as student perceptions of virtual and augmented reality technology as a tool for learning in medicine, teaching mentoring for junior doctors and its impact on the quality of medical student teaching, and improving ward round teaching for final-year medical students. However, the highlight of the conference for Imperial was undoubtedly the presentation of the ASPIRE Award for Student Engagement, reflecting the international quality of the medical school’s work in this area.