MyCourseMap: an interactive visual map to increase curriculum transparency for university students and staff

MyCourseMap is an interactive curriculum map created to increase curriculum transparency for both students and staff. It provides access to the entire curriculum at a glance, displays alignment of unit learning outcomes, assessments, course learning outcomes, and graduate attributes and links video from employers, graduates and students to help students reflect on the curriculum and its relevance. A prototype developed for the Bachelor of Pharmacy course at Curtin University as a proof-of-concept was tested and evaluated in 2014 and 2015. This evaluation utilised a mixed-methods approach using a blend of quantitative and qualitative data through online survey and structured focus group discussions. From the evaluation, the perceived benefits of the MyCourseMap include students’ increased understanding of their degree structure and its relevance to their chosen profession. From a staff perspective, the MyCourseMap helps with review and development of curriculum and professional accreditation. Barriers and challenges have led to prototype refinements

Does an incremental approach to implementing programmatic assessment work? Reflections on the change process

In 2017, the School of Medicine (Fremantle) of the University of Notre Dame Australia began moving towards programmatic assessment. Programmatic assessment seeks to achieve robust assessment validity through the assessment of a large number of low-stakes activities or data points. These data points exemplify assessment as learning by valuing feedback, discussion and reflection, ultimately leading to deeper student engagement without compromising credible decision-making on student progress. The School adopted an incremental approach to implementing programmatic assessment that included first establishing data-informed mentoring, and then activating a continuous assessment program that contributed simultaneously to student learning and School decision-making. Action research helped understand the impact of the initiative. Re-engineering continuous assessment as an incremental step towards programmatic assessment proved to be problematic. Some ideas are proposed to draw the strands of programmatic assessment together that may be useful for others to chart a more fruitful path

Implications of patterns of use of freely-available online formative tests for online summative tasks

The use of online assessment tasks in a summative context can create tensions between the institution’s need for security to ensure the validity of individual evaluations and the student’s need for flexibility of access. This is especially the case in recent years, with the upsurge of students engaged in paid employment while enrolled in full-time study. The lowest rate of engagement of students in paid employment at the three institutions in which our study was based was 65%, the highest 75%. One quarter of all students at this institution spent more than 20 hours a week in paid employment. Ninety seven percent of students in paid work were enrolled on a full-time basis. This study determined from automatically recorded times of logon, individual question submission and whole test submission the patterns of use of online feedback-enriched MCQ tests by 656 students across the three institutions in Perth, Western Australia. The conditions under which the tests were available to students varied from a strictly secured, summative task available for a limited time on campus within hours governed by the accessibility of automatically locked-down computer rooms and the availability of staff for live or video invigilation to a freely accessible formative learning exercise. Mismatches between preferred and available times severe enough to exclude some external students from assessment were identified. Evidence was found that for younger (16-18 year old) students especially, meaningful engagement with test-structured tasks lasts no more than 10 minutes, one third of the designed time of our current summative online tests. The one third, approximately, of enrolled students who did not use the online test facility had significantly poorer academic outcomes. The advantage granted by test use increased substantially with repetition. The question of how to ensure the security and validity of online testing while increasing real flexibility of access remains unresolved for us. We accept the social responsibility of finding a solution

An articulated approach to the development and evaluation of automated feedback for online MCQ quizzes in Human Biology

This paper describes an articulated programme of development and evaluation of automatically-presented explanatory feedback comments for online, enriched-multiple choice style quizzes in Human Biology for first year university courses. The degree of articulation of the separate components of the programme arose almost unintentionally from the inclusion of common sets of demographic questions in several of the components of the work, and from continuity of logon identities, but proved to be a powerful means of reaching an understanding of the dynamics of student engagement with the online learning process and of the effectiveness of the product we were testing. In particular, links were established between expectations of academic performance and the amount of paid employment in which students were engaged, and between expected and achieved levels of performance. Students who expected lower levels of performance at the outset were also less convinced of the potential of feedback to help them with their studies. Analysis of the patterns of use of the online test revealed a serious disadvantage to working students of current accessibility to online summative assessments, and that the standard duration of the summative tests was approximately three times the preferred online work span of the younger students. ‘Dose’ and ‘decay’-graded selective improvements in end of semester assessments in the topics covered by the feedback comments could be demonstrated

European youth work policy and young people's experience of open access youth work

This article examines young people’s experiences of open access youth work in settings in the UK, Finland, Estonia, Italy and France. It analyses 844 individual narratives from young people which communicate the impact of youthwork on their lives. These accounts are then analysed in the light of the European youth work policy goals. It concludes that it is encouraging that what young people identify as the positive impact of youth work are broadly consistent with many of these goals. There are however some disparities which require attention. These include the importance young people place on the social context of youth work, such as friendship, which is largely absent in EU youth work policy; as well as the importance placed on experiential learning. The paper also highlights a tension between ‘top down’ policy formulation and the ‘youth centric’ practices of youth work. It concludes with a reminder to policy makers that for youth work to remain successful the spaces and places for young people must remain meaningful to them ‘on their terms’

The value of targeted biological surveys: an assessment of Australia's Bush Blitz programme

Biodiversity assessment and decisions rely on knowledge of the spatial distribution of species, yet most global biodiversity is inadequately represented by occurrence records. Efforts to improve our knowledge of biodiversity distribution include targeted taxon survey programmes aimed at generating records of new, or previously unrecorded, species. Here, we evaluate nearly 8 years of biodiversity record collection by Bush Blitz, Australia's largest species discovery programme, to test how efficiently knowledge was added through the programme

Holocene fluctuations in human population demonstrate repeated links to food production and climate

We consider the long-term relationship between human demography, food production, and Holocene climate via an archaeological radiocarbon date series of unprecedented sampling density and detail. There is striking consistency in the inferred human population dynamics across different regions of Britain and Ireland during the middle and later Holocene. Major cross-regional population downturns in population coincide with episodes of more abrupt change in North Atlantic climate and witness societal responses in food procurement as visible in directly dated plants and animals, often with moves toward hardier cereals, increased pastoralism, and/or gathered resources. For the Neolithic, this evidence questions existing models of wholly endogenous demographic boom–bust. For the wider Holocene, it demonstrates that climate-related disruptions have been quasi-periodic drivers of societal and subsistence change

Reactions to symptoms of mental disorder and help seeking in Sabah, Malaysia.

Abstract Background: A better understanding is needed about how people make decisions about help seeking. Materials: Focus group and individual interviews with patients, carers, healthcare staff, religious authorities, traditional healers and community members. Discussion: Four stages of help seeking were identified: (1) noticing symptoms and initial labelling, (2) collective decision-making, (3) spiritual diagnoses and treatment and (4) psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Conclusion: Spiritual diagnoses have the advantage of being less stigmatising, giving meaning to symptoms, and were seen to offer hope of cure rather than just symptom control. Patients and carers need help to integrate different explanatory models into a meaningful whole.N/