Distance Education and Technology Infrastructure: Strategies and Opportunities

Distance education provides a wealth of opportunities and areas for innovation, but it also presents unique challenges for implementation and eventual success. To mitigate these challenges, this chapter will present four critical components—systems, objectives, evaluation, and personnel—that combine into one to create a technology infrastructure that can support distance delivery. Through this chapter, e-learning leaders will gain the knowledge to not only identify key features of tools used for distance delivery, but also understand and appreciate the correlation between a holistic infrastructure approach and quality distance delivery. The absence of one of these critical components will likely result in an unsuccessful technology integration. To aid in the explanation of these critical components, the chapter will focus on three main distance education delivery forms—webinars, classroom captures, and e-learning modules. The chapter will provide an overview of the types of questions and elements that should go into consideration of any distance education tool, and will aid in the effective assessment and evaluation of these tools, as well as personnel considerations that should be taken into account

“It Sounds Like a Drama:” Hearing Stories of Chronic Low Back Pain Through Poetic (Re)presentation

A poetic voice develops in different ways and from different sources. In this paper, a poetic voice is brought to the experiences of patients and family members as recounted in the first phase of a UK National Health Service funded Q-methodological study, the key outcomes of which are summarized. Their stories are presented as a single poetic performance text crafted from the analysis of combined transcripts of three focus group discussions. The performance bears witness to the sadness, frustration, and resolve of those living with chronic low back pain, and offers an additional hearing to that provided by the main study

Pitch perception at very high frequencies: On psychometric functions and integration of frequency information.

Lau et al. [J. Neurosci. 37, 9013-9021 (2017)] showed that discrimination of the fundamental frequency (F0) of complex tones with components in a high-frequency region was better than predicted from the optimal combination of information from the individual harmonics. The predictions depend on the assumption that psychometric functions for frequency discrimination have a slope of 1 at high frequencies. This was tested by measuring psychometric functions for F0 discrimination and frequency discrimination. Difference limens for F0 (F0DLs) and difference limens for frequency for each frequency component were also measured. Complex tones contained harmonics 6-10 and had F0s of 280 or 1400 Hz. Thresholds were measured using 210-ms tones presented diotically in diotic threshold-equalizing noise (TEN), and 1000-ms tones presented diotically in dichotic TEN. The slopes of the psychometric functions were close to 1 for all frequencies and F0s. The ratio of predicted to observed F0DLs was around 1 or smaller for both F0s, i.e., not super-optimal, and was significantly smaller for the low than for the high F0. The results are consistent with the idea that place information alone can convey pitch, but pitch is more salient when phase-locking information is available

Identification of a Likely Radio Counterpart of the Rapid Burster

We have identified a likely radio counterpart to the low-mass X-ray binary MXB 1730-335 (the Rapid Burster). The counterpart has shown 8.4 GHz radio on/off behavior correlated with the X-ray on/off behavior as observed by the RXTE/ASM during six VLA observations. The probability of an unrelated, randomly varying background source duplicating this behavior is 1-3% depending on the correlation time scale. The location of the radio source is RA 17h 33m 24.61s; Dec -33d 23' 19.8" (J2000), +/- 0.1". We do not detect 8.4 GHz radio emission coincident with type II (accretion-driven) X-ray bursts. The ratio of radio to X-ray emission during such bursts is constrained to be below the ratio observed during X-ray persistent emission at the 2.9-sigma level. Synchrotron bubble models of the radio emission can provide a reasonable fit to the full data set, collected over several outbursts, assuming that the radio evolution is the same from outburst to outburst, but given the physical constraints the emission is more likely to be due to ~hour-long radio flares such as have been observed from the X-ray binary GRS 1915+105.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ (no changes