Supporting and Enabling Scholarship: Developing and Sharing Expertise in Online Learning and Teaching

In a highly competitive, rapidly changing higher education market, universities need to be able to generate pedagogical expertise quickly and ensure that it is applied to practice. Since teaching approaches are constantly evolving, partly responding to emerging learning technologies, there is a need to foster ways to keep abreast on an ongoing basis. This paper explores how a small-scale project, the Teaching Online Panel (TOP), used scholarship investigations and a bottom-up approach to enhance one particular aspect of academic practice – online learning and teaching. The experiences of TOP are useful for identifying: - how a scholarship approach can help develop academic expertise - its contribution to enhancing understanding of staff’s different roles in the University - ways of developing the necessary supportive network for those undertaking such scholarship - the effectiveness of staff development which is peer-led rather than imposed from above - how practical examples can stimulate practice development - the relevance of literature on communities of practice and landscapes of practice for scholarship - the important role of ‘brokers’ to facilitate the dissemination of scholarship findings - the benefits to the brokers’ own professional roles - the challenges of sustaining such an approach and lessons learnt. This study has relevance for those involved in supporting scholarship or delivering staff development in Higher Education

Did You Know You're a Rhetorican?

Using rhetoric in writing consultations may leave consultants feeling like Dorothy lost in the Land of Oz. Before we study rhetoric, its foreign terms and fancy theorists -- kairos and Toulmin and ethos, oh my! -- lurk in a dark forest. Evil witches and monkeys jump out, blocking our paths home to the more familiar territory of the English major: discussing the writing process and flow, organization and transitions. If you’ve never explored the Land of Rhetoric before, join me for a stroll down the Yellow Brick Road. While our walk may feel new and frightening at first, like Dorothy, you’ll find your way back home, wiser for having undertaken the journey.University Writing Cente

The view from the trenches : satisfaction with eHealth systems by a group of health professionals

The integration and adoption of eHealth systems within the health sector faces challenges. As health care practitioners are the end users of eHealth systems, their perceptions of these systems are critical in order to address the issues surrounding their implementation and application. This paper presents the views that a group of health care professionals hold regarding the eHealth systems that they use as part of their day to day work. These views were analysed according to the perceptions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with eHealth systems that these professionals expressed. They expressed satisfaction with the information consistency, work efficiency, access to information, quality of information, and availability of technical support associated with their systems use. They expressed dissatisfaction with a lack of communication and compatibility between systems, deficiency in terms of system functionality, a lack of system reliability, a lack of initial and ongoing training, and a need to develop workarounds in order to achieve work goals. Overall this research indicates that satisfaction with eHealth systems is a complex issue, and that the negative aspects of system satisfaction need to be addressed and the positive aspects carefully built upon.<br /

Identification, Quantification, and Characterization of Nursing Home Resident Pain Trajectories

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Pain prevalence in nursing home (NH) residents is high. Studies report up to 85.0% of NH residents experience pain and up to 58.0% experience persistent pain. Pain in NH residents can lead to decreased happiness, quality of life, and life satisfaction. Traditionally, pain has been studied in relation to specific comorbid conditions or pain subtypes (nociceptive, neuropathic) with little consideration for the dynamic (temporal) nature of pain. Current pain subtypes are clinically linked to recommended pain treatments and provide insight into underlying mechanisms. However, current pain subtypes are limited by their focus on pain origin, do not include severity or duration of the pain experience, and do not illustrate how the course or trajectory of pain changes over time. Understanding the trajectory of pain experience can provide opportunities to alter the course of pain experience, improve residents’ quality of life and prevent adverse outcomes. This dissertation provides the first evidence of four distinct pain trajectories among NH residents including persistent pain which was associated with several resident characteristics and clinically relevant diagnosis. Using residents’ characteristics associated with persistent pain, such as a history of fracture or contracture, may improve care planning based on early identification or risk stratification and can improve mitigation of persistent pain. To identify and characterize pain trajectories in NH residents, the following activities were completed (1) systematic review of the literature related to prevalence of pain and associated factors in NH residents, (2) cross-sectional analysis of secondary data to examine prevalence of pain, persistent pain, and factors associated with pain in NH residents, and (3) a longitudinal retrospective analysis of secondary data using group-based trajectory modeling to identify, quantify, and characterize NH pain trajectories. The findings from this study highlight the prevalence and complexity of pain in NH residents