No Ordinary Time, No Ordinary Summer Program

No Ordinary Time, No Ordinary Summer Program describes the first year of a National Endowment for the Humanities program that taught students to produce a film through the study of humanities. The article outlines objectives of the grant and activities undertaken by students and includes several student quotes about the impact of the program. The final product, a thirty-minute film entitled No Ordinary Time, is a documentary that compares the Spanish Flu in Montana with students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic

Effectiveness of high-fidelity human patient simulation in learning to manage medically-complex infants

Survival of preterm and medically-complex infants has dramatically increased over the past thirty years due to significant advances in medical care and technology, however the developmental costs of survival are substantial. Comprehensive care of premature babies is critical and there is a need for more neonatal therapists, including speech-language pathologists (SLPs), with the knowledge and confidence to provide that care. Students in graduate SLP programs often receive little clinical experience or dedicated coursework in pediatric feeding and swallowing, especially with medically-complex infants. However, hands-on and experiential learning can support the development of the necessary foundational knowledge and confidence of students entering into the profession. High-fidelity human patient simulation can provide this experience with high-risk patients in a risk-free learning environment. This investigation examined the effect of high-fidelity human patient simulation on student knowledge of and confidence with managing physiologic stability of medically-fragile infants. A sequential, two-phase, embedded mixed methods design was employed. Two cohorts of graduate SLP students participated; the control group (Fall 2017; n = 28) and experimental group (Summer 2018; n = 24) both completed required coursework in pediatric dysphagia. All students completed all requirements of the course and also completed assessment measures at three time points: 1) prior to any didactic instruction, 2) following coursework, and 3) following the intervention. The intervention was either a written case study (control group) or a high-fidelity human patient simulation using the Super Tory® manikin (experimental group). Both conditions used the same case scenario developed by expert SLPs. Rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to examine student knowledge and confidence, as well as perceptions of learning in simulation (experimental group only). All students improved knowledge performance from pretest to posttest, and there was no significant difference between groups in knowledge at the posttest. There were significant differences between the control and experimental groups on confidence, particularly at the third timepoint. Following the simulation, the experimental group reported higher confidence than the control group with skills requiring hands-on experience. Findings of this investigation support integration of high-fidelity simulation into the SLP graduate curriculum to supplement and complement didactic and clinical training

Collaborating across Levels to Assess Dual Enrollment WRIT101: College Writing

Helena College hosted a Writing Assessment Workshop to ensure that high school and college instructors of College Writing (WRIT101) grade student work using the same standards and that high school students are writing at the same level as their college peers. Key to a successful outcome was developing a scoring rubric that reflected the published outcomes of the course, collecting student papers, and providing teachers with a collaborative atmosphere to discuss their approaches to evaluating student writing. This article describes the development process, the scoring protocol, and results of the assessment

A Study Of Biodegradable Ceramic Coatings For Magnesium-Based Implants

The objective of this study is develop some understanding of biodegradable, ceramic coatings that control the rate of corrosion of a magnesium-based implant by: optimizing parameters for fabricating metal oxides, determining surface roughness parameters, determining dependence of resorption time on coating thickness and determining the biological compatibility of aluminum oxide, ferric oxide and zinc oxide

Real-Time Digital Effects Processing Using iOS

In today’s society, we are seeing incredible improvements in terms of creating smaller technological devices that behave more and more like the personal computers of yesterday. Mobile “Smart” devices, in particular, are becoming incredibly powerful not just in terms of processing power, but in the fact that they are able to provide assistance to users in their everyday lives. Application developers are now able utilize the power and size of these devices, to create and realize ideas that would have been previously viewed as impossible. This project applies the fields of digital signal processing, music, and mobile application development, to effectively create a Real-Time digital effects processing application running on iOS

The Influence of Modernization in Comparative Criminology

A Review of Crime and Modernization by Louise Shelley, and Readings in Comparative Criminology edited by Louise Shelle