Abstracts 2008

The aim of the proposed project is to improve the skills of medical students in working with patients with health risk behaviours (smoking and alcohol problems, lack of exercise, obesity, etc.). The aim is to improve the skills of medical students in intervening with patients presenting health risk behaviours (smoking and alcohol problems, lack of exercise, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, etc.) by training them in the use of appropriate equipment.) by training them in the practice of adapted behaviour change counselling and motivational interviewing (EM-CCC). This training will be delivered via a 2 half-day interactive seminar and an interactive DVD.

The project has been designed to take account of advances in research and experience gained in the field. In the light of current epidemiological knowledge and research into the effectiveness of EM-CCC, this type of teaching is particularly important and promising in terms of public health. This training, given in small groups, in an interactive form with video examples, practical exercises and feedback games, as well as the use of an interactive DVD to continue or deepen the training, allows a high degree of personalisation and flexibility in learning. A scientific evaluation of the effectiveness of the seminar is being carried out by means of a randomised controlled trial. A funding application for the scientific evaluation has been submitted to the SNSF.

In terms of the project's integration and transferability, the Faculty of Biology and Medicine has stated its intention to include the seminar in its curriculum at the end of the 4th year. The form chosen for the training allows for easy transfer and could be applied to ongoing training in different fields. The interactive DVD could be used on its own, as a means of training or furthering the practice of EM-CCC and motivational interviewing, and marketing could be envisaged.

The interactive DVD could be used as a tool for training or furthering the practice of EM-CCC and motivational interviewing.

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The aim of the project is to supplement the existing data on the neuroanatomy teaching site developed by the applicant (currently available at www.webneuro.org ) in order to cover all the practical teaching of the anatomy of the central nervous system as delivered; in the 2nd and 3rd years of the medical curriculum during demonstrations in the anatomy room. These data relate to animated images (the marks indicating the structures only appear when the mouse is moved over the corresponding line) developed from the parts used during the demonstrations. Ideally, the site should cover all the rooms used during all the shows. .

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Fire scene investigation, the aim of which is to locate the origin of the fire and determine its cause, involves skills based on field experience. The origin and cause are determined from the various observations and marks found at the site. These observations/marks are systematically documented by photographs which, in a subsequent analysis, make it possible to be learned by people who have not been to the site.

As part of the curriculum at the Ecole des Sciences Criminelles (ESC), the practical grounding that is essential to understanding the discipline was achieved by taking learners to fire scenes. Given the ever-increasing number of students, such an approach is no longer possible. In addition, photographic boards of real cases on paper have been prepared and are submitted for group work. This type of exercise, while stimulating the learner's reflection, is unsatisfactory because it does not capture the process applied by the learners.

The proposed project, based on this observation and drawing on the experience acquired in the context of the PiAnoS image annotation interface project (RIS project), is designed to help learners to better understand the content of their images;PiAnoS image annotation interface project (RISET 2007 project), is to develop a web interface enabling the study of image files from actual cases processed by the ESC expertise department. These cases would consist of several sets of images that would be progressively studied and annotated by the learners. The aim is to document the traces and observations made on the images taken at the scene, and then to interpret them in order to link them to hypotheses, which may be contradictory, concerning the origin and cause of the fire. The web interface would allow these exercises to be carried out remotely and individually, as well as recording all the observations made by each learner for the various stages of the exercise.

The pedagogical scheme of individual observation and reflection would be supplemented by group discussions in two phases, which would be presented in class: (i) a summary of all the results obtained for a specific case and an assessment of the common and differing observations; (ii) an interpretation of the various results to propose a solution to the case as to the origin and cause of the fire.

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The project IguL-Conseil S.A. The aim of the IguL-Conseil S.A. project - in the form of a feedback game using problem-based learning strategies - is to offer students at the Master's level in Urban Studies the opportunity to use their knowledge and methods in a professional context;a mobilisation of their knowledge and methods as part of a professionalising process, while using new teaching tools (podcast, self-assessment in the form of quizzes).

This teaching project is based on the simulation of a town and country planning office (IguL-Conseil S.A.) carrying out a mandate. This mandate (« situation problème ») consists, within the framework of a problematic which is that of territorial diagnosis, in the realization of a public system of visualization of the territory of Lausanne susceptible to be freely consulted on Internet. Each morphological and functional unit of the conurbation will be described holistically: the urban forms studied will be associated with their socio-economic and demographic characteristics; the study of these forms will be enriched by more qualitative variables: fragments of interviews, mental mapping, films and photographs, soundscapes, etc.

Students will have to organise themselves in such a way as to meet the specifications appended to the fictitious invitation to tender. More specifically, the brief involves organising the work into sub-groups. Each of these groups is responsible for one part of the project.

The teachers play a facilitating role in this exercise. They advise and guide the students, and act as mediators between the various participants. They also encourage contact with representatives of administrative and political bodies.

The assistants are involved as principals. They formulate their request and ensure that the agent's response is consistent.

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Restructuring the importance of teaching programming for the Internet from a collaborative perspective will also increase student motivation. To achieve this, two IT tools will be developed for teaching purposes at each stage of the course. A wiki (i.e. a website content management system that allows web pages to be freely modified by all authorised visitors) will be used to provide a community structure for knowledge; In addition, the SubEthaEdit collaborative editor (allowing several users to work simultaneously on the same file) is being used to acquire the skills needed to master programming.

The combination of these two strategies should make it possible to mobilise the skills needed to develop a genuine professionalising classroom project.

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The aim of this project is to implement an IT service for the automatic analysis of literary texts as part of Italian literature seminars. The increasing availability of digitised literary texts (projects Gutenberg.org, LiberLiber.it, BibliotecaItaliana.it) now offers opportunities for didactic use that are still underestimated. The ambition of this text management and analysis tool is to provide a disciplinary and methodological framework for the use of digital resources available on the web.

In the medium term, the aim is to develop, among the main players in university education, a critical reflection on the potential offered by electronic access to different types of text. The software envisaged must be able to locate one or more texts and edit them, in order to automatically select and classify a large number of specific concepts (index, multiple references: proper nouns, place names, characters, or other morphological and syntactic concepts). These concepts will be able to be classified simultaneously in a very large number of texts in order to overcome the limitations of the usual procedures, based on a limited sampling of significant elements.

This IT tool will be applied, at this stage, to the analysis and indexing of Italian-language texts. The work will be carried out in collaboration with Mr Davide Picca, a graduate assistant in the Computer Science and Mathematical Methods Section (IMM-UNIL), who specialises in the automated processing of texts.

The project will be carried out in collaboration with Mr Davide Picca, a graduate assistant in the Computer Science and Mathematical Methods Section (IMM-UNIL), who specialises in the automated processing of texts.

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The aim of this project is to develop an innovative form of teaching that is suitable for large numbers of students (annual intake of more than 200), while at the same time providing personalised training. It concerns a specific and final part of the French literature curriculum: the acquisition, at Bachelor's level, of the theoretical foundations required for a coherent approach to literary works and genres. This teaching has two components. The first is traditional: it is an ex cathedra course on the history of criticism, providing a general framework for reflection, presenting the major themes and setting out chronological milestones. All that remained was to devise a formula that would actively encourage students to appropriate the complex subject matter presented in the course in a personal and involved way.

The « project-based » work, which has already been the subject of a pilot experiment over two years, brings several valuable innovations to this perspective: unlike the seminars, where students go each week to listen to their classmates' presentations, the project-based work gives students greater responsibility throughout the semester: divided into groups of two or three, they organise themselves independently to explore a given problem and a corpus of theoretical texts of around fifty pages; they meet their teacher a few times during the semester, take note of his or her advice and comments, before writing a text of around twenty pages, which then gives rise to a public defence.

Project work is carried out by assistants from the section, under the supervision of several professors. This is the other innovation brought about by this formula: it provides an opportunity for the future academic rector to practise the transmission of knowledge; and at the same time, the assistants are encouraged to deepen their own theoretical reflection, in constant dialogue with the professors in charge.

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Three educational intentions and/or needs underpin this project: valuing the work of migrant workers, closer links between academic training and the professional world, the difficulty observed over the last ten years of imparting teaching (on the theme of migration and health) that does not increase the reacute of the migrant in his or her alterity.

This project involved two preliminary phases (the second of which is currently underway) for which no funding was required: a) development of an initial project with twelve ex-migrants; b) collaboration with these ex-migrants during the health and migration course in spring 2008. The project itself also comprises two phases: a) collective reflection on this collaboration and preparation of a document for use by all UNIL lecturers and various university bodies (autumn 2008); b) publication and distribution of this document (December 2008).

The project will be carried out in two phases.

The project will enable students to: a) make a better link between the concepts addressed and their practical translations; b) project themselves into a future professional life; c) develop and try harder a critical attitude vis-à-vis institutional practices; d) to imagine ways of bringing an innovative touch to these practices; e) to give a value to their dissertation work that goes beyond simply obtaining an academic qualification.

The innovative character is: a) in the very conception of the project, the result of a collective and participatory process, entirely brainstormed; b) in its way of integrating the experience of former students into a university courses) in the way it conceives the link between university teaching and professional practice, between university teaching and social change. This project is compatible with the objective of enhancing the value of teaching at UNIL in many respects. Its transferability is straightforward and its sustainability fairly easily assured.

A significant number of students starting their studies in the social sciences have difficulty with methodological teaching, particularly statistics. The main reasons for this are a previous training that focused more on literary than mathematical subjects and, for a non-negligible number of students, a lack of understanding of the subject;For a significant number of students, there was a gap of several years between the end of secondary education and university entrance. These shortcomings in mathematics, which are either real or assumed by students, hinder their learning of statistics. As far as possible, we try to help students in difficulty, but the lack of resources, in particular the lack of assistants, makes it very difficult to provide them with the support they need. Most of the time, we are forced to refer them to books or tutors outside the university.

The aim of this project is to offer students an alternative in the form of a website dedicated to mathematical support. The site will enable all students who so wish to take an interactive test at the beginning of the year to assess their skills in the various areas of maths;This interactive test assesses students' skills in the various areas of mathematics that are useful for understanding the statistics course (linear algebra, calculus, logarithms and exponentials, integration, etc.).). At the end of the test, they will immediately receive an evaluation of their results, including a precise indication of the gaps to be filled. For each of these gaps, a set of links to websites, bibliographical references and exercises will be provided. At regular intervals throughout the year, students will be able to take another test to check whether or not they have made good their shortcomings.

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The aim of this project is to set up a field placement for bachelor-level students following courses in the sociology of religions supervised by the Interfaculty Department of History and Science of Religions (DIHSR) at the University of Lausanne during the 2008-2009 academic year.

The format of theoretical teaching is not the most suitable for learning about field observation. The study of a particular religious phenomenon or community requires long-term ethnographic investigations that will enable the student to make the best use of his or her knowledge and experience;This will enable the observer to take part in the activities he is observing and thus gain access to a particular ethnographic reality. The students taking part in this field course during the spring semester of 2009 will travel to the sanctuaries of Lourdes (France) in order to immerse themselves fully in this particular site, accompanied by experienced researchers able to guide them in situ during their observations. By preparing the students as part of their theory courses and organising the day-to-day monitoring of the ethnographic investigations carried out by the students during the week of the placement, the latter will be able to cover the research work in the sociology and anthropology of religions with realism.

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