Gamification as transformative assessment in Higher Education

Gamification in education is still a very new concept in South Africa. Being a 21st-century invention, it has already established itself in the world within the environs of the corporate market, marketing, training and the social world. This article will first discuss gamification (and all its other designations) and its applications in general; thereafter, the focus will be on the application of gamification within the environment of education, and more specifically with an emphasis on assessment. The burning question for South Africa is whether gamification can enhance a module or course on the level of higher education so much that an educational institution cannot do without it anymore, knowing that we are working with students belonging to the ‘Digital Wisdom generation’. This article would like to open the way for the implementation of gamification as a transformative online assessment tool in higher educationChristian Spirituality, Church History and Missiolog

Implementing an open source database to monitor water related SDG (SDG-6) in Tunisia

The 2030 Agenda was accepted in September 2015 in New York by the global heads of state and have launched 17 goals and 169 targets including a dedicated goal on water and sanitation (SDG-6) that calls on states to “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. The Agenda includes 6 objectives and 7 goals directly and indirectly related to water. This new Agenda have been defined through a bottom-up approach intended to be applicable in all nations. All the goals are inter-connected and all must be achieved which can push the humanity to change, to think differently and can involve making very big fundamental changes in how we live on earth. We introduce a concept for monitoring the implementation of water-related sustainable development goals (SDG-6) in Tunisia and present an approach for testing the concept at the scale of the Medjerda Catchment. The Medjerda catchment is the most important river basin of the country. The monitoring concept is coherent with the indicator framework that is negotiated at the UN level (UN Statistical Commission) but consider the specificity of current and future water data infrastructure of the Medjerda catchment. In order to boost water data availability in the near future, we propose to integrate approaches from the Citizen Science domain in the monitoring concept using new innovative mobile phone apps. In addition, we propose to create an open source database to process and share water-related data and provide high quality visualization. The robustness of the indicators that should be integrated in the monitoring concept must be SMART. This implies that they should be statistically evaluated to assess the quality of outcomes (data). We also propose Bayesian Data Fusion (BDF) techniques as a way to combine data from different quality in robust indicators

Early oral switch therapy in low-risk Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infection (SABATO) : Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Background: Current guidelines recommend that patients with Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infection (SAB) are treated with long courses of intravenous antimicrobial therapy. This serves to avoid SAB-related complications such as relapses, local extension and distant metastatic foci. However, in certain clinical scenarios, the incidence of SAB-related complications is low. Patients with a low-risk for complications may thus benefit from an early switch to oral medication through earlier discharge and fewer complications of intravenous therapy. The major objective for the SABATO trial is to demonstrate that in patients with low-risk SAB a switch from intravenous to oral antimicrobial therapy (oral switch therapy, OST) is non-inferior to a conventional course of intravenous therapy (intravenous standard therapy, IST). Methods/Design: The trial is designed as randomized, parallel-group, observer-blinded, clinical non-inferiority trial. The primary endpoint is the occurrence of a SAB-related complication (relapsing SAB, deep-seated infection, and attributable mortality) within 90 days. Secondary endpoints are the length of hospital stay; 14-day, 30-day, and 90-day mortality; and complications of intravenous therapy. Patients with SAB who have received 5 to 7 full days of adequate intravenous antimicrobial therapy are eligible. Main exclusion criteria are polymicrobial bloodstream infection, signs and symptoms of complicated SAB (deep-seated infection, hematogenous dissemination, septic shock, and prolonged bacteremia), the presence of a non-removable foreign body, and severe comorbidity. Patients will receive either OST or IST with a protocol-approved antimicrobial and are followed up for 90 days. Four hundred thirty patients will be randomized 1:1 in two study arms. Efficacy regarding incidence of SAB-related complications is tested sequentially with a non-inferiority margin of 10 and 5 percentage points. Discussion: The SABATO trial assesses whether early oral switch therapy is safe and effective for patients with low-risk SAB. Regardless of the result, this pragmatic trial will strongly influence the standard of care in SAB. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01792804registered 13 February 2013; German Clinical trials register DRKS00004741registered 4 October 2013, EudraCT 2013-000577-77. First patient randomized on 20 December 2013