Enhancing Experiential Learning Opportunities Through the Integration of Continuous Improvement Practices

Experiential learning (EL) in higher education has become a prominent academic curriculum component. Recent provincial guidelines emphasize that post-secondary institutions provide students EL opportunities, outlining criteria as to what counts as an EL activity. While these guidelines provide instruction on what an EL opportunity should contain, it does not detail how post-secondary institutions should develop and implement these activities responsive to their unique student population needs. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) aims to determine how an Ontario university can provide meaningful, student-focused EL opportunities through a centralized, theoretically-informed EL implementation framework. It centers around a Problem of Practice (PoP) at Gordon University (GU), where the absence of formal internal practices on how to develop and implement EL has created an imbalance in current offerings. Throughout the OIP, a distributed-adaptive hybrid leadership approach combined with the change path model (Cawsey et al., 2016) creates a pathway to propel identified change practices forward. An organizational analysis identifies key change areas, determining the scope and type of change needed. Using Starratt’s (1991, 1996) ethics of care, justice and critique reveals the ethical considerations and challenges a chosen solution needs to address. The result is a proposed solution to the PoP that focuses on organizational learning using Kolb’s (2015) EL theory. Embedding this organizational learning in GU’s existing quality assurance academic review framework will formalize the process. The model for improvement (Langley et al., 1994; Langley et al., 2009; Moen & Norman, 2009) guides the implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and communication plans to ensure continuous improvement of the chosen solution. Keywords: Experiential learning, Continuous improvement, Quality assurance, Distributed-adaptive leadershi

Physician Executive Leadership: Assessing a Student-Led Approach to Healthcare Leadership Education in Medical School

Poster presented at: 14th Annual AMA Research Symposium in Orlando, Fl Objective: To investigate the effectiveness of Physican Leadership, an open access, student-led healthcare leadership program at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, in preparing to face five key emerging topics in medical practice: healthcare economics, health policy, care and quality and safety, law and medicine, and patient experience. The Problem: Gaps in Medical Education Healthcare in the US continues to evolve, and topics such as health policy, health finance, and patient experience are not central to the practice of medicine. However, the sheer volume of material students are required to learn in the preclinical years makes it challenging to introduce new subjects into traditional medical school curricula. As a result, these topics in healthcare leadership are often left out. Indeed, only 40-50% of medical student report appropriate training in the practice of medicine, including subjects as medical economics, healthcare systems, and managed care.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/pel/1002/thumbnail.jp

Coin Value Counter

The coins which are required to be counted manually, collected in huge amount, for example the coins collected at donation box in the temples is very hard. Counting of coins be made easy with the method which is given here for coin recognition, and here scanning of the coin from both the sides is considered. The main aim of this project is counting the value of coins as well as the total number of coins using image processing with MATLAB. Coin segmentation and cropping is done using codes in image processing. The Eigen value of coins is calculated using MATLAB .Eigen values and Eigen vectors are used to create the Eigen faces of the coins which will help in Coin Recognition. Real-time image is captured and identified and thus coin recognition is done. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.150520

Evaluation of Provision and Support for Disabled Students in Libraries of Special Education Professional Degree Awarding Institutions (DAIs) and Rehabilitation Centers (RCs).

This study presents census data of provision and support for students with special needs (usually known as disabled students) in libraries of special education professional degree awarding institutions (DAIs) and rehabilitation centers (RCs) acting in Lahore. Questionnaire was used as research instrument in this quantitative study. Provisions and supports in libraries of DAIs and RCs were illustrated on graphs covering overall students with disabilities and different disability areas – physical impairments, hearing impairments, and visual impairments. Non-parametric tests were used for data analysis. Analysis of collected data confirmed that there was no association or relationship between provisions and supports for students with disabilities in libraries of DAIs and RCs, and type of disabilities. Similarly, Chi-square analysis showed that there was no association between sector and type of disability for provisions and supports for students with disabilities in libraries of DAIs and RCs. Findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for patrons with special needs’ education and librarianship in Pakistan. This research contributes its part for better attitudes, interactions, and understandings in libraries for students with special needs. Furthermore, this study guides librarians and administration of DAIs and RCs working for students with special needs regarding better provisions and supports in libraries for them

The Status of Left-Wing Politics in Pakistan after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The disintegration of the Soviet Union had a detrimental impact on Pakistan’s already fragmented and feeble Left politics. The retreat of communism in Moscow disappointed Leftists in Pakistan. Faced with disillusionment and frustration, prominent figures in Pakistan’s Left politics responded to the anti-communist measurements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during late 1980s in various ways. Some Leftists embraced other social and political ideologies, others went to the field of NGOs, while some remained steadfast in their commitment to the Marxist ideology. Soon after the disintegration, the Leftist political groups in Pakistan attempted to form a broader alliance but this experiment proved unsuccessful. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, these fragmented Left groups struggled to find cohesion. However, in the second decade of twenty-first century, there was a resurgence and a renewed sense of unity within the Left can be noted. Even after some success, the Left is unable to assert it as a political alternat in a time when there is a political vacuum and the mainstream parties failed in addressing the issues of the masses. Left is facing some serious internal and external challenges. Without overcoming these challenges, it can be safely assumed that the Left would be unable to play prominent role in the second half of 2020 too. Key Words: Left Politics, Pakistan, Disintegration of Soviet Union, Political Alliance

A 125 GeV SM-like Higgs in the MSSM and the γγ\gamma \gamma rate

We consider the possibility of a Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), with a mass of about 125 GeV and with a production times decay rate into two photons which is similar or somewhat larger than the SM one. The relatively large value of the SM-like Higgs mass demands stops in the several hundred GeV mass range with somewhat large mixing, or a large hierarchy between the two stop masses in the case that one of the two stops is light. We find that, in general, if the heaviest stop mass is smaller than a few TeV, the rate of gluon fusion production of Higgs bosons decaying into two photons tends to be somewhat suppressed with respect to the SM one in this region of parameters. However, we show that an enhancement of the photon decay rate may be obtained for light third generation sleptons with large mixing, which can be naturally obtained for large values of $\tan\beta$ and sizable values of the Higgsino mass parameter.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Corrected small typos and added reference

Review on Synchronization for OFDM Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation scheme. It is widely used modulation technique because it has high data rate, high spectral efficiency and robustness to multipath fading channel. One of the major drawbacks of OFDM system is synchronization. It is very sensitive to frequency synchronization errors in the form of Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO). The Carrier Frequency Offset can causes Inter Carrier Interference (ICI) and destroy the orthogonality of the OFDM system. Therefore it is necessary to perform frequency synchronization. In this paper various Carrier Frequency Offset Estimation methods are presented