Creating Online Lessons: A Faculty Development Seminar Series

The World Wide Web is being used increasingly to deliver instruction in medical education. Consequently, there is a need to train faculty in developing and implementing online instruction. We developed and implemented a seminar series to teach faculty to create educationally sound, well designed online instruction. Instruction was delivered to 15 participants via a six session seminar on developing web based lessons, supplemented with web-based instruction. First, the participants learned the basics of instructional design via a web based module. They then completed content outlines for their online lessons prior to the first seminar. Lesson development, web site development and the use of a web based instructional shell to implement the online lessons were each taught in two two hour sessions. Eight participants developed online lessons and four actually implemented them. Feedback was mostly positive, with suggestions for improvement. All eight participants who completed the series said they would recommend it to their colleagues. Because a longitudinal workshop type of seminar series requires a large amount of participant time outside of class, a six month seminar series may be too long. It is important at the beginning of the series to help participants select topics suitable for online instruction and to help them narrow their topics. We may change the attendance guidelines so faculty would attend only the session on instructional design and have their staff attend the technical sessions on web site design, HTML editing and online course delivery systems. This would better match the actual practice of faculty designing the instruction and staff developing it

England's Approach to Improving End-of-Life Care: A Strategy for Honoring Patients' Choices

Outlines England's evidence-based End of Life Care Strategy, its impact, and possible lessons for palliative care in the United States, such as the use of death at home as a metric for progress and Web-based training for clinical and caregiving personnel

Top Level Mesh

This paper will cover our report on the Top Level Mesh. We have built a web-based system for mesh network management. This system allows network utilities to be used from a web-based interface to monitor and manage the transfer of data. The system runs primarily on Raspberry Pis using Raspbian Linux. Users can access the system through web browsers to both configure the system and interact with the data on the network. We discuss our motivation for the project, design decisions made, technologies used and more throughout this report. We conclude with some lessons learned and future work to be done

Evaluating the semantic web: a task-based approach

The increased availability of online knowledge has led to the design of several algorithms that solve a variety of tasks by harvesting the Semantic Web, i.e. by dynamically selecting and exploring a multitude of online ontologies. Our hypothesis is that the performance of such novel algorithms implicity provides an insight into the quality of the used ontologies and thus opens the way to a task-based evaluation of the Semantic Web. We have investigated this hypothesis by studying the lessons learnt about online ontologies when used to solve three tasks: ontology matching, folksonomy enrichment, and word sense disambiguation. Our analysis leads to a suit of conclusions about the status of the Semantic Web, which highlight a number of strengths and weaknesses of the semantic information available online and complement the findings of other analysis of the Semantic Web landscape

Real-time new product development in financial services: Some managerial implications

A review of the various models of New Product Development (NPD) process shows that although different approaches have been proposed, they are in fact all variants on a linear theme: some may include feedback loops, but they all essentially advocate that certain steps precede, or are preceded by, others. An inevitable consequence on the Internet/World Wide Web (WWW or Web) is that such models are no longer applicable. Based on the lessons learned from the development of a new financial service offered via the Internet, we show how such assumptions of linearity need no longer be a constraint. In addition, innovativeness is not related to firm size. But the fact that the Web allows for the real-time development of new financial services based on on-going feedback from potential and current customers raises a new set of managerial issue that have to be tackled. The objective of this paper is to use the context of the recent launch of an innovative financial services product via the Web to explore the managerial changes that are starting to affect the banking industr

Improving Primo Usability and Teachability with Help from the Users

In the aftermath of a consortium migration to a shared cloud-based resource management and discovery system, a small college library implemented a web usability test to uncover the kinds of difficulties students had with the new interface. Lessons learned from this study led to targeted changes, which simplified aspects of searching, but also enhanced the librarians’ ability to teach more effectively. The authors discuss the testing methods, results, and teaching opportunities, both realized and potential, which arose from implementing changes

Didactic Networks and exemplification

After a general overview in a previous paper [AMJ10b], in which we proposed Didactic Networks (DN) as a new way for developing and exploiting web-learning content, we offer here a deeper study showing how to use them for web-learning design and content generation based on Instructional Theory with the coherence guaranty of the RST [MT99]. By using a set of expressivity patterns, it is possible to obtain different final ¿products¿ from the DNs such as different level or different aspect web-learning lessons, depending on the target, documents or evaluation tests. In parallel we are defining the Fundamental Cognitive Networks (FCN), in which we deal with the most common patterns human being uses to think and communicate ideas. This FCN set reuses the representation of Concepts, Procedures and Principles defined here, and it is the main topic of a paper we are working on for the very near future

Utilising Flash Meeting software in collaborative design-learning

In this paper, we describe a case study of computer-supported collaborative learning in design using FM (FlashMeeting), a Web-based video-conferencing tool offered freely on OpenLearn. This 6-week experiment, involving Open University students and staff, aimed to explore the capabilities of FM software to support several phases of the design process including formulating a design brief, discovering user requirements, setting design specifications, concept generation, design embodiment and implementation of proposed concepts. We conclude this paper with lessons learned from using FM in a design e-learning project

Evaluation of World Wide Web-based Lessons for a First Year Dental Biochemistry Course

First year dental students at The University of Texas Dental Branch at Houston (Dental Branch) are required to take a basic biochemistry course. To facilitate learning and allow student self-assessment of their progress, WWW-based lessons covering intermediary metabolism were developed as a supplement to traditional lectures. Lesson design combined text, graphics, and animations and included learner control, links to other learning resources, and practice exercises and exams with immediate feedback. Results from an on-line questionnaire completed by students in two different classes showed that they completed 50% of the lessons and spent an average of 4 hrs. on-line. A majority of the students either agreed or strongly agreed that practice exercises were helpful, that the ability to control the pace of the lessons was important, that the lesson structure and presentation was easy to follow, that the illustrations, animations, and hyperlinks were helpful, and that the lessons were effective as a review. The very positive response to the WWW-based lessons indicates the usefulness of this approach as a study aid for dental students

Using Web‐based support for campus‐based open learning: Lessons from a study in dental public health

There has been much written about the use of the Web in higher education, much of which advocates its use as an effective way of supporting learning, particularly in terms of the desirability of features such as flexibility and the value of online discussions. In this paper, a case study is described which calls some of this received wisdom into question. The study also explores wider issues of curriculum design, particularly in terms of the role of assessment and of self‐assessment, both of which played a crucial role in the course. Unlike many studies, then, the purpose of this paper is not to demonstrate the success of a particular approach or to advocate particular forms of practice, but instead to highlight the shortcomings of existing guidelines for curriculum development in this area. This suggests that further inquiry into this form of education is required — and in particular, inquiry that pays detailed attention to the backgrounds of learners, and involves close study of their experiences