Quality assurance in transnational higher education : a case study of the tropEd network

Transnational or cross-border higher education has rapidly expanded since the 1980s. Together with that expansion issues on quality assurance came to the forefront. This article aims to identify key issues regarding quality assurance of transnational higher education and discusses the quality assurance of the tropEd Network for International Health in Higher Education in relation to these key issues.; Literature review and review of documents.; From the literature the following key issues regarding transnational quality assurance were identified and explored: comparability of quality assurance frameworks, true collaboration versus erosion of national education sovereignty, accreditation agencies and transparency. The tropEd network developed a transnational quality assurance framework for the network. The network accredits modules through a rigorous process which has been accepted by major stakeholders. This process was a participatory learning process and at the same time the process worked positive for the relations between the institutions.; The development of the quality assurance framework and the process provides a potential example for others

Are patient-centered care values as reflected in teaching scenarios really being taught when implemented by teaching faculty? A discourse analysis on an Indonesian medical school's curriculum

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>According to The Indonesian Medical Council, 2006, Indonesian competence-based medical curriculum should be oriented towards family medicine. We aimed to find out if the educational goal of patient-centered care within family medicine (comprehensive care and continuous care) were adequately transferred from the expected curriculum to implemented curriculum and teaching process.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Discourse analysis was done by 3 general practitioners of scenarios and learning objectives of an Indonesian undergraduate medical curriculum. The coders categorized those sentences into two groups: met or unmet the educational goal of patient-centered care.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Text analysis showed gaps in patient-centered care training between the scenarios and the learning objectives which were developed by both curriculum committee and the block planning groups and the way in which the material was taught. Most sentences in the scenarios were more relevant to patient-centered care while most sentences in the learning objectives were more inclined towards disease-perspectives.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>There is currently a discrepancy between expected patient-centered care values in the scenario and instructional materials that are being used.</p

How To Get Your Clinical Teaching Team Ready For Curriculum Change: A Practical Guide

Our health care system is constantly adapting to change at an increasingly rapid pace. Unavoidably, this also applies to the field of medical education. As a result, clinical teaching teams face the challenging task of successfully implementing the proposed changes in daily practice. It goes without saying that implementing change takes time and that you need to be patient. However, a successful change process needs more than that. Change models or strategies could offer a helping hand. The questionnaire Specialty training’s Organizational Readiness for curriculum Change (STORC) is a tool aiming to do just that. With a focus on readiness for change, this questionnaire tries to support implementation efforts in PGME. Additionally, since change is a team effort, it focusses on clinical teaching teams particularly. In this paper, we offer a practical guide for clinical teaching teams on how to deal with any concerns or hurdles detected in any of the core elements of readiness for change, in order to smoothen and support the educational change processes these teams are confronted with

Скоростные уравнения экситонного лазера

Получены скоростные уравнения экситонного лазера в системе взаимодействующих экситонов и выведены условия инверсной населенности и генерации.Указана принципиально новая возможность создания гамма-лазера.Отримано швидкістні рівняння екситонного лазера в системі взаємодіючих екситонів та виведено умови інверсної населеності, генерації. Показано принципово нову можливість створення гамма-лазераThe rate equations of the exciton laser in the system of interacting excitons have been obtained and the inverted population conditions and generation have been derived. The possibility of creating radically new gamma-ray laser has been shown

LEFT BEHIND: MONITORING THE SOCIAL INCLUSION OF YOUNG AUSTRALIANS WITH SELF- REPORTED LONG TERM HEALTH CONDITIONS, IMPAIRMENTS OR DISABILITIES 2001 - 2009

Adolescents and young adults with disabilities are at heightened risk of social exclusion. Exclusion leads to poor outcomes in adulthood which in turn affects individuals’ health and wellbeing and that of their families and society through loss of productive engagement in their communities. Australia’s Social Inclusion Indicators Framework provides indices in domains of participation, resources and multiple and entrenched disadvantage to monitor and report on social inclusion. The Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey provides data over time on households in Australia. Using these tools we report here on the extent of social inclusion/exclusion of young disabled Australians over the past decade. Relative to their non-disabled peers, young disabled Australians are significantly less likely to do well on participation indicators.Centre for Disability Research and Polic

A social contract model of ‘disintegrity’ within the dual-process paradigm of moral psychology: Reducing the scope of the ‘belief-behavior incongruity’

Explaining why students cheat when it violates their moral beliefs, also called the ‘belief-behavior incongruity’ (BBI), is a difficult challenge most often overcome by referring to neutralization techniques, first described by Sykes and Matza (1957), whereby individuals deceive themselves with specious justifications for ignoring the moral imperative to follow rules. An underlying assumption of the neutralization view, that individuals’ abstract moral beliefs apply automatically to all contexts, is critiqued in the present work. The account of academic dishonesty developed herein is centered on the hypothesis that adolescent students’ felt moral obligation is informed by an intuitive sense of reciprocity between themselves and their learning contexts, which resembles a social contract, or ‘psychological teaching- learning contract’ (PTLC). Students who regard a class context or teacher more negatively are thus expected to feel less moral obligation to follow rules, and to cheat more as a result. The hypothesized PTLC model, which included key variables related to (A) self-concept, (B) achievement goal structure, (C) learning strategies, (D) moral obligation, and (E) social comparison theory, was tested with data from a diverse sample of secondary students in fifteen international schools across Asia, Europe, and Africa. A pilot study (N = 96) of the construct validity of psychometric measures was conducted prior to the Main Study, which included a Time 1 sample of N = 493, a Time 2 sample of N = 297 (spaced by approximately one year), and a longitudinal matched sample of N = 225. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to test the validity and invariance of the measurement model, as well as the structural relations hypothesized between variables. A small degree of gender non-invariance prompted separate analyses of gender-specific models. Results supported the PTLC hypothesis. Moral obligation overwhelmingly mediated the effects of perceived class quality on academic integrity, indicating that students felt morally obliged to be honest in a given class, as a function of their regard for its quality

A realist synthesis of educational interventions to improve nutrition care competencies and delivery by doctors and other healthcare professionals

Objective: To determine what, how, for whom, why, and in what circumstances educational interventions improve the delivery of nutrition care by doctors and other healthcare professionals work. Design: Realist synthesis following a published protocol and reported following Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) guidelines. A multidisciplinary team searched MEDLINE, CINAHL, ERIC, EMBASE, PsyINFO, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, Google Scholar and Science Direct for published and unpublished (grey) literature. The team identified studies with varied designs; appraised their ability to answer the review question; identified relationships between contexts, mechanisms and outcomes (CMOs); and entered them into a spreadsheet configured for the purpose. The final synthesis identified commonalities across CMO configurations. Results: Over half of the 46 studies from which we extracted data originated from the USA. Interventions that improved the delivery of nutrition care improved skills and attitudes rather than just knowledge; provided opportunities for superiors to model nutrition care; removed barriers to nutrition care in health systems; provided participants with local, practically relevant tools and messages; and incorporated non-traditional, innovative teaching strategies. Operating in contexts where student and qualified healthcare professionals provided nutrition care in developed and developing countries, these interventions yielded health outcomes by triggering a range of mechanisms, which included feeling competent, feeling confident and comfortable, having greater self-efficacy, being less inhibited by barriers in healthcare systems and feeling that nutrition care was accepted and recognised. Conclusions: These findings show how important it is to move education for nutrition care beyond the simple acquisition of knowledge. They show how educational interventions embedded within systems of healthcare can improve patients’ health by helping health students and professionals to appreciate the importance of delivering nutrition care and feel competent to deliver it

A system for room acoustic simulation for one's own voice

The real-time simulation of room acoustical environments for one’s own voice, using generic software, has been difficult until very recently due to the computational load involved: requiring real-time convolution of a person’s voice with a potentially large number of long room impulse responses. This thesis is presenting a room acoustical simulation system with a software-based solution to perform real-time convolutions with headtracking; to simulate the effect of room acoustical environments on the sound of one’s own voice, using binaural technology. In order to gather data to implement headtracking in the system, human head- movements are characterized while reading a text aloud. The rooms that are simulated with the system are actual rooms that are characterized by measuring the room impulse response from the mouth to ears of the same head (oral binaural room impulse response, OBRIR). By repeating this process at 2o increments in the yaw angle on the horizontal plane, the rooms are binaurally scanned around a given position to obtain a collection of OBRIRs, which is then used by the software-based convolution system. In the rooms that are simulated with the system, a person equipped with a near- mouth microphone and near-ear loudspeakers can speak or sing, and hear their voice as it would sound in the measured rooms, while physically being in an anechoic room. By continually updating the person’s head orientation using headtracking, the corresponding OBRIR is chosen for convolution with their voice. The system described in this thesis achieves the low latency that is required to simulate nearby reflections, and it can perform convolution with long room impulse responses. The perceptual validity of the system is studied with two experiments, involving human participants reading aloud a set-text. The system presented in this thesis can be used to design experiments that study the various aspects of the auditory perception of the sound of one’s own voice in room environments. The system can also be adapted to incorporate a module that enables listening to the sound of one’s own voice in commercial applications such as architectural acoustic room simulation software, teleconferencing systems, virtual reality and gaming applications, etc