Sheetal Kavia, eProjects Manager at St George's, shares her story for International Women's Day.
Below, Sheetal discusses her time at St George's and how she has adapted to working during the Covid-19 pandemic. This includes her work in developing an online course for GPs, to easily update and share Covid-19 guidance to help them deliver their service safely. Sheetal also shares her advice for other women exploring their careers, including in eLearning.
My time at St George's
I joined St George’s in 2007 after graduating from Brunel University in BSc Medical Biology. I started as a Learning Technologist and worked my way to my current role, eProjects Manager.
Most of my work has been project based and some have been recognised and awarded by The Times Higher Education Award, Association of Learning Technology and e-Learning awards.
I have also completed the Aurora Advance HE Programme, which supports women to develop in leadership roles. This really helped me to develop in my role within the eLearning Unit and also take on extra responsibility by co-chairing the Race and Ethnicity Network.
My work during the pandemic
In the eLearning Unit we have always worked with academics to transform their teaching to be more online or supplemented with online resources, so when the pandemic hit and we were all asked to work from home, we became very busy.
Everything changed very quickly at the start of the pandemic and we found there was a need for more education and information for the frontline healthcare workers on Covid-19.
To address this I worked with Dr Mohammad Razai and Fiona Howat (also in the eLearning Unit) to develop a course to help frontline General Practitioners on what they should do during the pandemic to continue to provide a service to their patients, but in a safe and protective way for their workforce and their patients.
I led the development of the course with Dr Razai and colleagues to shape and structure the course within a 4 week period (normally such Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) would take over 6 months to develop!).
I really enjoyed the development of this MOOC because I was able to create a lot of the images within the course, all whilst having Covid-19 myself (luckily my symptoms were not too serious).
As a result of the success of this course we were able to update the course and release it again for staff as things changed with Covid-19, as well as adapting the whole course for use in Africa.
We were also approached by Ilara Health (who work to bring accurate and affordable diagnostics to people in Africa who would otherwise struggle to access these services) for the African version of the course. For this I led the work to make the content more local to Africa and adapted the imagery to fit better for an African healthcare audience.
As staff are now more comfortable with online teaching, I am approached more frequently by colleagues looking to create more online courses, especially massive open online courses, which we deliver through the biggest MOOC UK platform, called FutureLearn.
There is also drive and appetite to deliver more awarding courses online and this is something we are working on for the future.
My advice for women looking to start their careers and explore roles in online learning
Go for it! Think outside the box and push boundaries – there is no one way of doing things and things are always developing so always try to talk to others and keep an eye out for what others are doing in the industry.
Funding is always going to be an issue so look out for funding and collaborations but never let this hold you back from thinking out of the box, and be forward thinking in this developing field.
Try different things and make the most of every opportunity. Ask questions because it shows your interest but also you don’t know where these conversations and networking can lead to.
Everyone is learning, no matter what their experience.
I have been at St George’s for a long time now and I have seen leadership of the university change from being male dominated to now a lot of women in senior leadership roles. It is great to see this and also work with fantastic women who encourage each other to develop in their roles.
It is known that women tend to self-doubt their own ability and I would love for the future women to have more belief in themselves and push themselves – being uncomfortable only helps development.
Find out more about International Women's Day and read more stories from the St George's community.