A Synchronous Online Social Work PhD Program: Educational Design and Student/Faculty Response

ABSTRACT

Faculty and students evaluate the curriculum design and delivery of a synchronous online PhD program in social work that prepares scholar-practitioners in social work research, education, and organizational practice. The designers envision a collaborative community of scholars and leaders nurtured by a cohort-based, sequenced curriculum, and intentional faculty mentoring. This teaching and learning platform provides an opportunity to engage with a globally diverse population of doctoral students while fostering both relationships and quality learning outcomes. Educational design and pedagogical features of the program are described and analyzed through the collaborative thinking and learning platform of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model’s interdependent elements–teaching, cognitive, and social presence. Eighteen students and ten faculty evaluated the strengths and limitations of the online program across each dimension of the model through student course evaluations, focus-group reflections, and qualitative faculty survey data. Student and faculty respondents specified the benefits of synchronous presence across all three dimensions. They also identified significant barriers, particularly in the areas of teaching and social presence. Implications and recommendations are based on a review of findings that inform pedagogical decisions and design options for online PhD education in social work.     

Open Data: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Open data is information that is provided by public entities to be accessed and reused. Publishing open data is an excellent way to improve an organization’s transparency and provide insight into the value of the organization. Libraries are uniquely positioned to assist their patrons in the use of open data by making them aware of it and helping them access and use it. This article provides a short history of open data and explores ways that library trailblazers are already using open data as well as contributing open data for others to use. Getting started with open data involves identifying key open data resources such as data.gov, identifying library information that would be beneficial to publish, and creating programs that provide digital literacy training and create opportunities for patrons to engage with open data in new and creative ways.     

An Analysis of the Effect of Student Prepared Notecards on Exam Performance

Allowing the use of student-prepared notecards has been suggested as a way to increase student performance, with the literature showing mixed results. By allowing students to utilize a notecard on some, but not all, tests in principles of macroeconomics, we examine the effect notecards have on student performance. Our analysis utilizes a novel method of controlling for student aptitude and instructor biases in each sample. The results show improvements in performance both as a whole and by level of question based on Bloom’s taxonomy and question difficulty levels. In addition, we find notecard usage by students leads them to become more optimistic and realistic about their test performance, as well as leading students to study more efficiently.     

All Christians? Experiences of science educators in Northern Ireland

In this paper we respond to Staver’s article (this issue) on an attempt to resolve the discord between science and religion. Most specifically, we comment on Staver’s downplaying of difference between Catholics and Protestants in order to focus on the religion-science question. It is our experience that to be born into one or other of these traditions in some parts of the world (especially Northern Ireland) resulted in starkly contrasting opportunities, identities and practices in becoming and being science educators. The paper starts with a short contextual background to the impact of religion on schooling and higher education in Northern Ireland. We then explore the lives and careers of three science/religious educators in Northern Ireland: Catholic (Jim) and Protestant (Ivor) males who are contemporaries and whose experience spans pre-Troubles to post-conflict and a Catholic female (Colette) who moved to Northern Ireland during the Troubles as a teenager. Finally, we discuss the situation regarding the teaching of creationism and evolution in Northern Ireland—an issue has recently generated high public interest. The Chair of the Education Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly recently stated that “creationism is not for the RE class because I believe that it can stand scientific scrutiny and that is a debate which I am quite happy to encourage and be part of…” (News Letter 2008). It could be the case that the evolution debate is being fuelled as a deliberate attempt to undermine some of the post-conflict collaboration projects between schools and communities in Northern Ireland.     

Do profoundly prelingually deaf patients with psychosis really hear voices?

THE PSYCHIATRIC LITERATURE has described profoundly prelingually deaf people with psychosis who report hearing voices. The present study proposes that such reports in fact reflect the beliefs of professionals in mental health and deafness and not the hallucinatory experience of psychotic deaf people. The study demonstrates that it is functionally meaningless to assert that a prelingually profoundly deaf psychotic patient "hears voices," and provides a theoretical structure from which to consider more appropriately the internal experiences of deaf people with psychosis, and to encourage the clinically relevant articulation of these experiences. The authors also suggest that the "true" phenomenological experience is of secondary clinical interest to the meaning imposed upon it by the client and the distress caused by it.