Paving the Way to Simpler: Experiencing from Maximizing Enrollment States in Streamlining Eligibility and Enrollment

Since 2009, the eight states (Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin) participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Maximizing Enrollment program have worked to streamline and simplify enrollment systems, policies, and processes for children and those eligible for health coverage in 2014. The participating states aimed to reduce enrollment barriers for consumers and administrative burdens in processing applications and renewals for staff by making improvements and simplifications at every step of the enrollment process. Although the states began their work before the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), their efforts positioned them well for implementation in 2014, and offer experiences and lessons that other states may find useful in their efforts to improve efficiency, lower costs, and promote responsible stewardship of limited public resources

Exploring notions of genre in 'academic literacies' and 'writing across the curriculum': approaches across countries and contexts

The SIGET IV panel on genre in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and “academic literacies” (ACLITS) has set rolling a discussion of the similarities and differences in the two traditions, the former originating in the US in the early 1970s, the latter originating in England in the early 1990s. This paper maps out some elements of each in relation to the other and to genre, which we hope will set in motion further discussions and cross-fertilization

On Refining Twitter Lists as Ground Truth Data for Multi-Community User Classification

To help scholars and businesses understand and analyse Twitter users, it is useful to have classifiers that can identify the communities that a given user belongs to, e.g. business or politics. Obtaining high quality training data is an important step towards producing an effective multi-community classifier. An efficient approach for creating such ground truth data is to extract users from existing public Twitter lists, where those lists represent different communities, e.g. a list of journalists. However, ground truth datasets obtained using such lists can be noisy, since not all users that belong to a community are good training examples for that community. In this paper, we conduct a thorough failure analysis of a ground truth dataset generated using Twitter lists. We discuss how some categories of users collected from these Twitter public lists could negatively affect the classification performance and therefore should not be used for training. Through experiments with 3 classifiers and 5 communities, we show that removing ambiguous users based on their tweets and profile can indeed result in a 10% increase in F1 performance

Moving beyond e-journals

Paul Ayris explains to Elspeth Hyams why scholarly communication has moved beyond the debate on e-journals pricing and open access

How are higher education institutions dealing with openness?. A survey of practices, beliefs, and strategies in five European countries

Open Education is on the agenda of half of the surveyed Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in France, Germany, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. For the other half of HEIs, Open Education does not seem to be an issue, at least at the time of the data collection of the survey (spring 2015). This report presents results of a representative a survey of Higher Education institutions in five European countries (France, Germany, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom) to enquire about their Open Education (OE) practices, beliefs and strategies (e.g MOOCs). It aims to provide evidence for the further development of OE to support the supports the Opening Up Communication (European Commission, 2013) and the renewed priority on Open Education, enabled by digital technologies, of ET2020

A broad character education approach for addressing America’s cheating culture

Cheating is highly prevalent in American high school students and across the globe. Although numerous approaches are in place to combat this issue, most character education approaches have focused primarily on fostering moral integrity (a strength of moral character). Here, we argue that a broad character education approach to addressing cheating culture—one drawing on moral, civic, performance, and intellectual character strengths – may provide new ways to address this epidemic. We begin by outlining current scholarship and approaches to addressing cheating. We then note that many of these interventions aim to foster academic integrity through a moral lens and posit that a broad character education approach that draws on all four areas of character (not moral character alone) may provide additional avenues for promoting student integrity and dissuading academic dishonesty. We discuss the potential benefits of building specific strengths within each character domain in relation to integrity, and offer suggestions for further research. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of how educators might leverage each of these character areas and the interplay between them to foster academic integrit

Virtual reality urban modelling - an overview

This paper offers an overview of the increasing use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for the simulation of urban environments. It provides a summary of cities worldwide where three-dimensional computer modelling is being utilised to aid urban planning. The study considers the need for a digital representation of cities and raises issues pertaining to advantages, barriers and ownership. A case study of a pilot project on the visualisation of Newcastle upon Tyne is examined to show an approach adopted for the representation of this city in North East England. The process of this visualisation is summarised and future research is outlined in relation to this city model

Emerging needs in behavioral health and the integrated care model

Medically vulnerable populations are constantly at risk of having poor health related outcomes, low satisfaction in the healthcare system and increased mortality. Studies have shown the increased prevalence rates of various medical comorbidities in patients with severe mental illness. These patients are obviously vulnerable because of their mental illness but they are also more likely to have severe cases of medical conditions commonly seen in the general population. Expenditures and utilization of resources is often inappropriate due to frequent visits for acute needs and low rates of preventative care and primary care appointments. My proposed model focuses on the implementation of the integrated care model which encourages collaboration between mental health professionals and primary care physicians through referral programs or integrated clinic settings. This model is initiated with education to both current clinicians as well as future clinicians through medical schools and residency programs. Once the education component has begun, the next steps are formal exploration, preparation, implementation and evaluation of the model in clinics. The aim is to improve health outcomes by increasing preventative care and using behavioral techniques to assist with adherence, increase satisfaction in the healthcare system and contain expenditures by utilizing primary care services instead of emergency services when appropriate

South Carolina: Round 1 - State Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.South Carolina has its work cut out for it. As a state with one of the highest poverty rates and poorest health outcomes indicators, one thing stakeholders from all perspectives agree on is the need for improvement in the state's health status. Successful implementation of the ACA in South Carolina -- for those who believe that is the goal -- will require building greater public understanding of the ACA and enrolling all who are eligible in a state in which government distrust is high and public insurance program take-up rates have traditionally been low. It will also require a shift in position on the Medicaid expansion option. As long as the state's poorest uninsured remain without assistance, the aims of the ACA to promote widespread access to health care will never be realized