Associate Professor Silas Taylor
Associate Professor

Associate Professor Silas Taylor

MBChB BSc MEd

Medicine & Health
Faculty Office

I am a skilled, multiple award-winning teacher, including of the Vice Chancellors award (2017). My expertise is in Clinical Skills teaching and I have considerable experience in, and enthusiasm for, simulation-based medical education. As a medical educator, my research focuses on my teaching practice.

As a curriculum designer, I have successfully implemented a volunteer Simulated Patient Program (SPP) into the UNSW Medicine curriculum, as well as the technologically and educationally innovative Online Simulated Patient Interaction and Assessment (OSPIA) online platform. My research has shown that introduction of the SPP led to a significant improvement in student OSCE scores in our program across all skills domains. Similarly, OSPIA has been demonstrated to lead to significant improvements in students’ communication skills.

In 2017, I led the development of the Clinical Workplace-based Assessment application. CWAapp is now being used by students for all assessments in the clinical setting and to record clinical encounters and log competence in clinical skills and procedures. This powerful record will benefit students, tutors and administrators as well as improve academic oversight and quality assurance for the medical program. Furthermore, it will provide considerable data for research.

I welcome the opportunity to work with those who wish to work in the field of medical education research.

Location
CSEP | Ground Floor, Wallace Wurth Building (C27) | Botany St | Randwick
  • Book Chapters | 2022
    2022, 'Comparison of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems', in Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Springer Nature Singapore, pp. 123 - 131, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5538-9_8
  • Journal articles | 2022
    2022, 'Development and Evaluation of an Online Exam for Exercise Physiology During the COVID-19 Pandemic', Journal of Clinical Exercise Physiology, 11, pp. 122 - 131, http://dx.doi.org/10.31189/2165-6193-11.4.122
    Journal articles | 2021
    2021, 'Assessment methods and the validity and reliability of measurement tools in online objective structured clinical examinations: A systematic scoping review', Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, 18, pp. 11, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/JEEHP.2021.18.11
    Journal articles | 2021
    2021, 'Empirical analysis comparing the tele-objective structured clinical examination (teleOSCE) and the in-person assessment in Australia', Journal of educational evaluation for health professions, 18, pp. 23, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2021.18.23
    Journal articles | 2020
    2020, '“I Am Most Grateful.” Using Gratitude to Improve the Sense of Relatedness and Motivation for Online Volunteerism', International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 36, pp. 1325 - 1341, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1746061
    Journal articles | 2019
    2019, 'A Comparison of Online Automatic Speech Recognition Systems and the Nonverbal Responses to Unintelligible Speech', , http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12403v1
    Journal articles | 2019
    2019, 'Comparison of the effects of simulated patient clinical skill training and student roleplay on objective structured clinical examination performance among medical students in Australia', Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, 16, pp. 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2019.16.3
    Journal articles | 2019
    2019, 'Definition of professionalism and tools for assessing professionalism in pharmacy practice: A systemic review', Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, 16, pp. 22, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2019.16.22
    Journal articles | 2019
    2019, 'Insights into student assessment outcomes in rural clinical campuses', BMC Medical Education, 19, pp. 380, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-019-1828-z
    Journal articles | 2019
    2019, 'Students’ behavioural engagement in reviewing their tele-consultation feedback within an online clinical communication skills platform', Computers in Human Behavior, 94, pp. 35 - 44, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.01.002
    Journal articles | 2018
    Chong L; Taylor S; Haywood M; Adelstein BA; Shulruf B, 2018, 'Examiner seniority and experience are associated with bias when scoring communication, but not examination, skills in objective structured clinical examinations in Australia', Journal of educational evaluation for health professions, 15, pp. 17, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2018.15.17
    Journal articles | 2018
    Shulruf B; Damodaran A; Jones P; Kennedy S; Mangos G; O'Sullivan AJ; Rhee J; Taylor S; Velan G; Harris P, 2018, 'Enhancing the defensibility of examiners' marks in high stake OSCEs', BMC medical education, 18, pp. 10, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-1112-z
    Journal articles | 2018
    Taylor S; Bobba S; Roome S; Ahmadzai M; Tran D; Vickers D; Bhatti M; De Silva D; Dunstan L; Falconer R; Kaur H; Kitson J; Patel J; Shulruf B, 2018, 'Simulated patient and role play methodologies for communication skills training in an undergraduate medical program: Randomized, crossover trial', Education for Health: Change in Learning and Practice, 31, pp. 10 - 16, http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/1357-6283.239040
    Journal articles | 2018
    2018, 'Borderline grades in high stakes clinical examinations: Resolving examiner uncertainty', BMC Medical Education, 18, pp. 272, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1382-0
    Journal articles | 2017
    Chong L; Taylor S; Haywood M; Adelstein BA; Shulruf B, 2017, 'The sights and insights of examiners in objective structured clinical examinations', Journal of educational evaluation for health professions, 14, pp. 34, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2017.14.34
    Journal articles | 2016
    Liu C; Lim RL; McCabe KL; Taylor S; Calvo RA, 2016, 'A web-based telehealth training platform incorporating automated nonverbal behavior feedback for teaching communication skills to medical students: A randomized crossover study', Journal of Medical Internet Research, 18, http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6299
    Journal articles | 2016
    Liu C; Scott KM; Lim RL; Taylor S; Calvo RA, 2016, 'EQClinic: A platform for learning communication skills in clinical consultations', Medical Education Online, 21, http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v21.31801
    Journal articles | 2016
    Liu C; Scott KM; Lim RL; Taylor S; Calvo RA, 2016, 'EQClinic: a platform for learning communication skills in clinical consultations.', Med Educ Online, 21, pp. 31801, http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v21.31801
    Journal articles | 2016
    Taylor S; Shulruf B, 2016, 'Australian medical students have fewer opportunities to do physical examination of peers of the opposite gender', Journal of educational evaluation for health professions, 13, pp. 42, http://dx.doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2016.13.42
    Journal articles | 2016
    2016, 'Improving medical students' awareness of their non-verbal communication through automated non-verbal behavior feedback', Frontiers in ICT, 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fict.2016.00011
  • Conference Papers | 2021
    2021, 'Labour of Love: Volunteer Perceptions on Building Relatedness in Online Volunteering Communities', in Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, presented at CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451665
    Conference Papers | 2021
    2021, 'MONAH: Multi-modal narratives for humans to analyze conversations', in EACL 2021 - 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, pp. 466 - 479
    Preprints | 2021
    2021, MONAH: Multi-Modal Narratives for Humans to analyze conversations, , http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2101.07339
    Conference Papers | 2020
    2020, 'Designing for Helpers: Identifying new design opportunities for digital volunteerism', in DRS2020: Synergy, Design Research Society, presented at Design Research Society Conference 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.281
    Preprints | 2019
    2019, A Comparison of Online Automatic Speech Recognition Systems and the Nonverbal Responses to Unintelligible Speech, , http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1904.12403
    Conference Papers | 2018
    2018, 'Automatic mimicry detection in medical consultations', in 2017 IEEE Life Sciences Conference, LSC 2017, pp. 55 - 58, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LSC.2017.8268142
    Conference Posters | 2018
    2018, 'Digital assessment: empowering students and supporting teachers through innovative student-oriented educational practices', UNSW Sydney, presented at 2018 UNSW Learning and Teaching Forum — Partners in Learning: Connecting Communities, UNSW Sydney, 26 October 2018
    Conference Papers | 2016
    2016, 'EQClinic: A platform for improving medical students’ clinical communication skills', in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), pp. 73 - 84, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48335-1_8

I have been successful with a variety of teaching grants, which subsequently allow research opportunities:

  1. Development of a Simulated Patient Program for Clinical Skills teaching in Phase 1 of the UNSW Medicine program. Awarded by Health Workforce Australia – Quality Clinical Training, July 2014. Amount: $100, 207
  2. Online simulated patient (SP) service for clinical communication skills training and assessment using an internet-based video-telephony service. Awarded by Department of Health, May 2015. Amount: $75,000
  3. An application to facilitate mobile clinical Workplace-Based Assessments (CWAapp). Awarded by UNSW Office of the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education). June 2017. Amount: $45,000
  4. Peer physical examination – pedagogical research award. Awarded by UNSW Learning and Teaching Unit. Oct 2011. Amount: $10,000

2017 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence (General category)

2016 Asia-Pacific Meeting for Simulation in Healthcare, Technical Innovation prize

2016 Faculty Award for Innovation in Learning and Teaching

2015 UNSW Staff Excellence Awards – Excellence in Community Engagement (Highly commended)

2014 Faculty Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning

2013 UNSW Staff Excellence Awards – Nominated for Excellence in Community Engagement (Individual)

Clinical skills, incl physical examination and communication skills (generic, clinical, verbal/non-verbal).

OSCE's - variables and reliability - stations, examiners, bias