Addressing the Quality and Safety Gap Part III: The Impact of the Built Environment on Patient Outcomes and the Role of Nurses in Designing Health Care Facilities

Discusses the evidence-based design of facilities' physical elements to align architecture, information technology, clinical processes, and workplace culture as it relates to nursing practice, administration, and education. Includes case summaries

The Socioeconomic Gap in University Dropouts

In many countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., there is ongoing concern about the extent to which young people from lower-income backgrounds can acquire a university degree. Recent evidence from the U.K. suggests that for a given level of prior achievement in secondary school a disadvantaged student has as much chance of enrolling in a university as a more advantaged student. However, simply participating in higher education is not sufficient—graduation is important. Therefore, this paper investigates whether students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have a higher rate of university dropout when compared to their wealthier counterparts, allowing for their differential prior achievement. Using a combination of school and university administrative data sets, we show that there is indeed a sizeable and statistically significant gap in the rate of withdrawal after the first year of university between advantaged and disadvantaged English students. This socioeconomic gap in university dropouts remains even after allowing for their personal characteristics, prior achievement in secondary school and university characteristics. In the English context, at least, this implies that retention in university of disadvantaged students is arguably a more important policy issue than barriers to entry for these students

Culturally Sensitive IS Teaching: Lessons Learned to Manage Motivation Issues

This paper seeks to raise awareness of culturally sensitive teaching that is largely overlooked in the IS teaching community. In a global, networked environment commonly faced by the contemporary business or academic world, it is imperative to prepare future IT professionals with adequate cultural understanding of such a multicultural environment in which their future work practice will engage. Derived from a teaching case situated in the context of HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in the US, this paper narrates and reflects cultural issues and challenges that are increasingly prevalent in today‟s education systems. More specifically, the study analyzes motivational issues that are commonly observed in a homogeneous student group and provides practice lessons to help educators who might face similar issues in their teaching context to manage those issues. Insights gained from the study help reflect the significance of developing culturally sensitive pedagogy that might require future IS educators‟ and researchers‟ attention

Building an application for the writing process

The idea that writing is a process and not a product is now generally accepted in writing education, but discussions of digital scholarly communication often neglect the idea, in theory and in practice. This thesis report introduces a Mac OS X software package to support the early stages of the writing process, called Brouillon. Brouillon’s features include: the concatenation of discrete note files into notebooks; notes appearing in multiple notebooks; note intake from mobile devices via Dropbox; and an open standard file format. The report also provides a model of the organization of products of the writing process, with a focus on Brouillon’s most unusual feature, multi-notebook notes. It discusses difficulties in implementation and identifies possibilities for future improvement

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

A Model of an E-Learning Web Site for Teaching and Evaluating Online

This research is endeavoring to design an e-learning web site on the internet having the course name as "Object Oriented Programming" (OOP) for the students of level four at Computer Science Department (CSD). This course is to be taught online (through web) and then a programme is to be designed to evaluate students performance electronically while introducing a comparison between online teaching , e-evaluation and traditional methods of evaluation. The research seeks to lay out a futuristic perception that how the future online teaching and e-electronic evaluation should be the matter which highlights the importance of this research

Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all