Creating Interactive Online Instruction: The McGoogan Library Experience

Online instruction is a hot topic at academic medical centers. Seizing the opportunity to join the online movement at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), the McGoogan Library created an open access course made up of six learning modules. The modules addressed three issues: 1) supplementing one-shot library instruction, 2) offering opportunity for instruction when a librarian is not embedded in a course, and 3) showcasing the library as an online instruction supporter. This article discusses the planning process, technology used, how the modules were received, and how this initial project increased McGoogan Library's involvement in the UNMC online movement.     

Computer-Assisted Rubric Evaluation: Enhancing Outcomes and Assessment Quality

This case study examines the use of computer-assisted grading rubrics using Blackboard’s ? Rubric Evaluation Report to compare expected performance for each criterion of an assignment to the students’ level of achievement. Several studies have reported on the innovative and effective delivery of how learning management systems (LMS) can deliver real-time (immediate data delivery) antecedents that inform students of performance requirements (Atkinson & Lim, 2013; Goomas, in press). The impetus, then, is to perform an analysis on each criterion of the assignment in order to determine how closely student performance matched the requirements of the rubric. Used as an analytical tool, the instructor was able to direct students to particular learning activities and to adjust teaching tactics in order to meet or exceed the rubric requirements.     

Enzyme activity and myoglobin concentration in rat myocardium and skeletal muscles after passive intermittent simulated altitude exposure

Abstract

We studied the effect of intermittent hypobaric hypoxia exposure on lactate dehydrogenase and citrate synthase activities, together with myoglobin content, of rat myocardium, tibialis anterior, and diaphragm muscles. The intermittent hypoxia exposure programme consisted of daily 4-h sessions in a hypobaric chamber (5000 m) over a period of 22 days. Samples were taken at the end of the programme, and 20 and 40 days later, and compared with those of control animals. In myocardium, lactate dehydrogenase activity was significantly depressed in animals 20 days post-exposure (314.6 ± 15.3 IU · g^?1) compared with control animals (400 ± 14.3 IU · g^?1), while citrate synthase activity and myoglobin concentration showed a significant stepwise increase from control animals (88.2 ± 3.6 IU · g^?1 and 4.38 ± 0.13 μm · mg^?1) to animals 20 days (104.7 ± 3.7 IU · g^?1 and 5.01 ± 0.17 μm · mg^?1) and 40 days post-exposure (108.8 ± 6.5 IU · g^?1 and 5.11 ± 0.22 μm · mg^?1). In contrast, no differences were found in diaphragm and tibialis anterior muscles. Our results show that intermittent hypobaric hypoxia exposure increased the oxidative character of myocardium even 20 days after the hypoxic stimulus has ceased, and that this effect lasts for more than 40 days for citrate synthase activity and myoglobin concentration. These findings support our previous results on skeletal and cardiac muscle capillarization after passive intermittent simulated altitude exposure, thus providing morphofunctional and biochemical evidence for increased cardiac aerobic efficiency.     

Does athletic training in volleyball modulate the components of visual evoked potentials? A preliminary investigation

Abstract

This longitudinal study investigated visual evoked potentials (VEPs) in 11 young female volleyball players who participated in extensive training for 2 years. The control group consisted of 7 age-matched female students who were not involved in any regular sports activity. Recordings of VEPs were performed twice: baseline recording (i.e., before training began) and after 2 years of systematic, volleyball-specific athletic training. The effect of athletic training on visual signal conductivity was assessed by recording the latency of N75, P100 and N135 components of the VEPs waveform. Extensive experience with volleyball training reduced signal conductivity time through visual pathway. Specifically, the latency of P100 was reduced on average by 2.2 ms during binocular viewing. Moreover, athletes had reduced N75 latency (difference of 3.3 ms) for visual stimuli that generated greater response from peripheral retina. These results indicate that sport training can affect very early sensory processing in athletes.     

Who attends and completes virtual universities: the case of the open University of Catalonia (UOC)

A highly touted feature of the so-called global “revolution” in higher education is the trend to use information technology to reach a broader clientele. Although there is evidence that students may be learning the material in on-line courses as well as in traditional face-to-face universities, how well students learn content is not the only reason they persist to a degree, and student persistence is an important goal of higher education institutions. In this paper, we make the case that the life conditions for students attending virtual universities are different from those of “traditional” students in face-to-face universities, and that this difference puts a particular (largely non-pecuniary) premium on time to degree. With our data from a Catalan virtual university, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), we are able to test this hypothesis directly by using the heterogeneous degree structure of the Catalonian/Spanish higher education system to estimate whether the number of courses required to get various degrees (the length of the degree program) is significantly related to student persistence. The study analyzes several cohorts of students (those who entered in 2000–2003) studying in the UOC and estimates the factors that influence their degree completion. We find that the completion rate is generally low, but that students taking shorter degree courses at the UOC are much more likely to complete their degrees. This suggests that, given their clientele, on-line universities operate under very different constraints from their face-to-face counterparts. Our results are important for higher educational researchers, who have mainly focused on younger populations attending face-face universities. They also can serve university administrators who launch distance education degree programs and make high stakes decisions about them with little of no information on the likely behavior of their older students, and can serve employers who are deciding whether to subsidize their employees to take advanced degrees through on-line programs of study.     

Developing Generic Competences in the European Higher Education Area: a proposal for teaching the principles of economics

The participation of Spain in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) involves a number of important challenges for academics. Adapting to an educational model that is characterised by competence-based teaching is a difficult task, yet it is of paramount importance in the context of current reforms. In an educational system in which the traditional lecture prevails, learning-centred teaching represents a major cultural change with significant consequences. The objective of this study is to offer economics lecturers some practical techniques for use in the classroom. Specifically, it includes suggestions for the planning, preparation and teaching of lectures, seminars, tutorials, case studies, debates, and computer-based learning. It also provides practical advice on student assessment.     

What do science teachers think about developing scientific competences through context-based teaching? A case study

ABSTRACT

In this paper we explore the views and opinions of four secondary education science teachers regarding the teaching of scientific competences. Their views were gathered in the context of a training programme in which they had to design, implement, and assess their own teaching unit for developing students’ scientific competences by means of context-based learning. Analysis of the data yielded a set of 14 categories distributed across 5 areas: scientific competence and context-based teaching; the teacher and his/her professional environment; implementation in the classroom; development of the teaching unit; and assessment. This process also identified the aspects which teachers believed either facilitated or acted as an obstacle to the development of scientific competences through context-based teaching. We discuss the implications of our findings and suggest ways in which a shift towards a context-based approach to teaching scientific competences can best be achieved, and consider a series of factors related to teachers’ professional identity that may influence this process.     

A sociocultural analysis of mandated curriculum change: the implementation of a new senior physics curriculum in New Zealand schools

We analyse the implementation of a new New Zealand physics curriculum from a socio‐cultural perspective. We explore the development of the curriculum document and examine the obstacles to its implementation. Change was compromised by the lack of any intersubjective linkage between teachers and the curriculum designers. The teachers’ own community of practice was most influential in how implementation occurred.

Curriculum change processes and discourses must be made transparent so that teachers can have a framework for ‘dereification’ of a curriculum document into their classroom practices. Without planning for teachers’ participation in the negotiation of curriculum meanings, curriculum developers themselves become marginalized, and the cultural objects they have developed will be adopted in unanticipated ways.     

Phantom traces: exploring a hermeneutical approach to autobiography in curriculum studies

Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald’s writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII who wrestled with his difficult inheritance. The paper considers the ‘phantom traces’ of the author in Sebald’s creative writing, using the example of the story he tells of Paul Bereyter, Sebald’s elementary teacher. Paul committed suicide by laying himself on the railroad tracks of the town that first denied him the opportunity to teach during WWII yet accepted him back to the classroom after the war. Apparent in the telling of Paul’s story is Sebald’s interest in an ‘invisible subject’—the prolonged effect of the past, especially traumatic events, on thinking, feeling human beings. The paper draws on Sebald’s particular way of writing about his subject ‘at a slant’ so as to argue for a hermeneutical approach to currere, or autobiography in education.