King's College London

This programme provides participants, who have clinical professional experience, with the opportunity to pursue postgraduate education relevant to their professional interests and requirements. The programme aims to provide a distinctive element by combining work-based opportunities with theoretical underpinning, thus enabling participants to develop their own practice as clinical educators.

Participants need to have regular teaching responsibilities as part of their role, because of course activities and also because of the programme’s focus on the connection between theory and practice in clinical education.

Postgraduate Certificate

The heart of the Masters in Clinical Education programme is the Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Education. As a recognised teaching qualification in higher education, the programme is dual accredited: successful completion of the programme awards participants Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and Membership of the Academy of Medical Educators via the expedited accredited application route. Course participants from a nursing and midwifery background will have the option of specific support in developing their teaching, as required by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. As a 60-credit Level 7 award, the Certificate is comprised of one 45-credit required module that encourages grounding in pedagogic thinking and practice, and one 15- credit option module of the participant’s choice.

Postgraduate Diploma

Upon successful completion of the Postgraduate Certificate, and with agreement from the programme team, participants can apply to continue their study into the Diploma level. Participants at this level can pursue one further required module and three option modules from a range of interdisciplinary and discipline-specific options. The basis of the Diploma is the module Using Research in Clinical Education. This module offers participants an insight and understanding into the methodologies and methods used to conduct enquiry in clinical education settings, and an opportunity to develop their ability to systematically analyse the existing research in order to understand more about pedagogical issues in day-to-day clinical practice. The second module at this level, Researching Clinical Education, which is required to continue onto the masters level but is otherwise optional at the diploma level, takes this a step further by encouraging participants to develop their own plan for designing and conducting an appropriate enquiry in their own settings. Colleagues with an existing Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Education, or a similar award, from another institution, may apply for admission at this level by requesting an Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL).

Masters in Clinical Education

Once participants have advanced through the Postgraduate Certificate and Diploma stages of the Programme successfully, and by agreement from the programme team, they can register on the Dissertation Module to complete the Masters in Clinical Education. The dissertation, which consists of an extended piece of written work of between 10,000 and 15,000 words, enables participants to demonstrate their ability to plan, carry out and evaluate a piece of research into an aspect of their academic practice. It will be an original piece of work, which might, for example, present new evidence on a familiar aspect of teaching and learning; apply established leadership models or theories to a new context; or present an independent critique of an existing body of theory.