Work in motion: the role of active workspaces in academic libraries

PurposeThe University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Libraries has set aside space and stocked it with treadmill desks, standing desks, cycling desks and balance chairs to encourage physical activity while using library space to promote active learning. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of this innovative space on library users through a study conducted by a research team using observations and short surveys to gather information about usage trends and user perceptions of this “active learning space.”Design/methodology/approachThis study used both ethnographish observation and self-selected survey. Researcher observation notes were used to gather usage rates of the space and equipment in the space, and survey responses were coded for themes to identify user perceptions around the space.FindingsThe findings strongly suggest that users find mental and physical health value in the “active learning space” and many would find value in the expansion and improvement of the space.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations of this study include a shorter observation period compared to the survey collection period and limited demographic collection to shorten the survey instrument.Originality/valueHowever, this study was able to assess how an active learning space in an academic library can influence and have a significant impact on student success.

Background Fecal immunochemical tests (FITs) are an acceptable and cost-effective way to identify patients at risk for colorectal cancer (CRC). However, patients who receive an abnormal FIT result must obtain a follow-up colonoscopy. Rates of follow- up colonoscopy are low in most healthcare settings, particularly in federally qualified health centers (FQHCs). Half of patients with an abnormal FIT result fail to complete this essential colonoscopy screening component. Patient navigation can provide much needed support for patients to complete the follow-up colonoscopy. Methods PRECISE is a patient-randomized trial of patient navigation vs usual care for follow-up colonoscopy that will enroll 1,200 patients across 28 community health center clinics in Washington State (anticipated 37% Latinx). For the study, we trained a bilingual (native Spanish speaker) patient navigator (PN) using an intensive 8-week program, based on the New Hampshire Colorectal Cancer Screening Program. As part of the recruitment and data tracking tool used by the PN, open text fields are available for documenting interactions with navigated patients. We present a qualitative content analysis of the open text fields of navigated patients. These findings identify a broad range of supportive interactions engaged in by the PN to assist patients in overcoming barriers to follow-up colonoscopy completion. Results To-date, 124 patients have been randomized to navigation, and 44 of these had open text field documentation. Our content analysis found slightly more than half (N=23) required more intensive navigation assistance for overcoming a variety of barriers such as fear of or misinformation about the colonoscopy; help with scheduling, transportation, and interpreter services; and assistance with obtaining and completing the bowel preparation. Those that needed less navigation (N=21) mostly required assistance with scheduling the colonoscopy and often had protective factors such as prior colonoscopy experience or support from family/friends for completing the procedure. Overall, the top three areas the PN tended to provide support for overcoming barriers included: contacting the gastroenterologist office to problem- solve issues like lack of referral, scheduling delays, or to obtain appointment information (40 instances); assisting the patient with obtaining, understanding, and completing the bowel preparation including diet restrictions, medication interaction, and preparing/consuming the mixture (25 instances); and verifying, coordinating, and offering transportation/escort support before and after the colonoscopy procedure (22 instances). Conclusion The PRECISE trial highlights the importance of targeted patient navigation to improve CRC screening completion. Our open text field findings demonstrate the necessary role of patient navigation for overcoming the multitude of educational and structural challenges facing FQHC patients when attempting to complete a follow-up colonoscopy. Citation Format: Jennifer L. Schneider, Jennifer S. Rivelli, Jamie Thompson, Amanda Petrik, Neha Yadav, Hanna Dinh, Cindy Pulido, Shirley Mendez, DeeDee Torres, Gloria Coronado. Supporting community health center patients in completing follow-up colonoscopy: A qualitative summary of patient navigation activities [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Conference: Thirteenth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2020 Oct 2-4. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(12 Suppl):Abstract nr PO-246.

The increase in the volume of available data is changing how people perceive their own fields and how the people may interact with this surplus of information. Public security is not different; law enforcement agencies (LEAs) now have available a large quantity of information to help them fight criminality. One challenging problem is to classify/predict criminal activities. The differentiation over two different complaints may only be clear through the careful analysis of complaints' open text fields (e.g., the modus operandi), where the specificity of the perpetrated crime is described. Sometimes the intention behind a crime is not evident unless it is correlated to other crimes and patterns get extracted from them. This chapter shows that it is possible to classify criminal data using machine learning-based methods and that open text fields, such as the modus operandi, may play a fundamental role in the performance of the classification.

Active learning space emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The active learning space design represents not only an overhaul of traditional classrooms’ physical appearances but also reflects a paradigm shift from teacher-centered learning to student-centered learning. Current available research mainly focused on student academic performance as well as student and faculty perceptions. No research has been conducted to investigate interactions at the student level to find out what interactions are taking place in the active learning space and how they affect student learning. This study employed a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design inquiring into student learning in an active learning space first through student focus group discussions and then with an online student survey. The major themes emerged from the focus group discussions were utilized to develop the online survey. The purpose of this survey was to cross-validate qualitative outcomes and further seek answers to unanswered questions triggered by qualitative findings. The qualitative data indicated that the spatial equity in the active learning space put students in positive mindsets and induced active classroom participation. The interconnected screens made it easy for students to view class content and collaborate with peers. The group work conducted in the space fostered mutual learning, promoted learning accountability and improved peer relations. The quantitative survey data on group dynamics validated and reinforced qualitative findings. This paper will help educators better understand student behaviors in the active learning space and better design space-appropriate pedagogical strategies.

Improving knowledge of cyclist crashes based on hospital data including crash descriptions from open text fields

Here is a fascinating first-hand perspective of the dramatic changes that have occurred in academic library administration over the past five decades. In Leadership in Academic Libraries, distinguished directors of academic and research libraries pay tribute to W. Porter Kellam, Director Emeritus of the University of Georgia, by presenting an overview of the course of academic and research libraries over the span of his 50 year career. Administrative leaders in academic librarianship including Stuart Forth, Richard Chapin, Frank Grisham, and Ken Toombs offer a frank, perceptive, and witty account of the state of library leadership based upon many decades of accumulated experience and hard-earned knowledge.Leadership in Academic Libraries provides valuable insights on library administration, and in particular, on the job of the library director. Readers interested in the history of academic libraries and library administration will gain new insight on the environment in which these leaders worked and how they dealt with university administration and changes in collection development. Chapters also provide advice on how library directors can keep their jobs, and the value of forming professional friendships. Other topics addressed include developments in academic and research libraries over the past five decades in library administration, library services, library architecture, and interlibrary cooperation. An enjoyable autobiographical essay by Mr. Kellam that recounts his long and distinguished career concludes this remarkable volume.Library science students and professionals who wish to become more knowledgeable about the history of academic libraries will cherish the first-hand experiences of library leaders during the richest and most invigorating time in the history of American libraries. Academic librarians and library students researching the job of library director or the recent history of academic libraries will benefit from the experience and wisdom of these leaders in the areas of administration, library architecture, automation, and library cooperation.

Library deans are expected to demonstrate their library contributes to student success, especially in a time of scarce resources. This article describes one such effort to link student success to students’ use of the library. Student success is, in a large part, the result of student engagement, of which academic and social engagement are two prominent components. For the purposes of empirical research, academic and social engagement are suitable proxies for determining how various university programs and services, including libraries, contribute to student engagement and, thereby to student success. However, in the library and information science literature, very little qualitative research is available about the contribution of library space to student engagement. To fill this gap, a qualitative, transcendental phenomenological study, using semi-structured, in-depth interviews, was conducted at a medium-size public university in Southwest Florida to collect and analyze data on student perceptions of the relationship between their academic and social engagement and the way they used academic library spaces. Study participants agreed that using library spaces contributed to their ability to study independently and to interact with their peers on group projects and assignments, depending on the types of spaces available. This study has implications for academic library administrators who must demonstrate the value of library services and resources, including library space, to university administrators who are focused on student retention and success. By using the interview protocol from this study, library administrators will be able to collect valuable data that may be used to persuade university administrators when requesting funding to renovate existing library spaces, to build new library spaces, or to advocate to retain existing spaces.

Evidence suggests that Active Learning (AL) and Active Learning Spaces (ALSs) have the potential to improve student learning outcomes. In this study, the student experiences of AL and ALSs in four classes in mathematics and statistics at a Norwegian university are examined through classroom observations, surveys, and interviews. The student interviews are analysed using constant comparative method, which resulted in one main category and three sub-categories presenting what the students perceived to be significant factors that impacted their learning experiences in the ALSs and how these factors affected their motivation to engage with the subject. The main category is called Engagement and Comfort, and the three sub-categories are called Students’ Varying Preferences, Student-student Communication, and Teachers’ Communication. Students’ motivation was looked at through an Approach-Avoidance Theory lens. Crucial to the student experiences was that some students felt deeply uncomfortable in the ALSs, which prevented them from engaging and benefitting from the ALSs. This research highlights how students’ comfort in the ALSs is essential to ensure their engagement and suggests many aspects that can support students’ comfort. Future research and professional development programmes built upon the reflections here can be used to support improved educational quality.

Receiving timely and appropriate treatment is crucial for better health outcomes, and research on the contribution of specific variables is essential. In the mental health domain, an important research variable is the date of psychosis symptom onset, as longer delays in treatment are associated with worse intervention outcomes. The growing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) within mental health services provides an invaluable opportunity to study this problem at scale retrospectively. However, disease onset information is often only available in open text fields, requiring natural language processing (NLP) techniques for automated analyses. Since this variable can be documented at different points during a patient’s care, NLP methods that model clinical and temporal associations are needed. We address the identification of psychosis onset by: 1) manually annotating a corpus of mental health EHRs with disease onset mentions, 2) modelling the underlying NLP problem as a paragraph classification approach, and 3) combining multiple onset paragraphs at the patient level to generate a ranked list of likely disease onset dates. For 22/31 test patients (71%) the correct onset date was found among the top-3 NLP predictions. The proposed approach was also applied at scale, allowing an onset date to be estimated for 2483 patients.

Background: Health care providers (HCPs) require ongoing training and mentorship to fully appreciate the palliative care needs of children. Project ECHO® (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) is a model for delivering technology-enabled interprofessional education and cultivating a community of practice among HCPs who care for children with life-limiting illness.Objectives: To develop, implement, and evaluate the Project ECHO model within the pediatric palliative care (PPC) context. Specific objectives were to evaluate (1) participation levels, (2) program acceptability, (3) HCP knowledge changes, (4) HCP self-efficacy changes, and (5) perceived practice changes after six months.Intervention: An interprofessional PPC curriculum was informed by a needs assessment. The curriculum was delivered through monthly virtual 90-minute TeleECHO sessions (didactic presentation and case-based learning) from January 2018 to December 2019. The program was freely available to all HCPs wishing to participate.Design: A mixed-methods design with repeat measures was used. Surveys were distributed at baseline and six months to assess outcomes using 7-point Likert scales. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were conducted. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Board at the Hospital for Sick Children.Results: Twenty-four TeleECHO sessions were completed with a mean of 32 ± 12.5 attendees. Acceptability scores (n = 43) ranged from 5.1 ± 1.1 to 6.5 ± 0.6. HCPs reported improvements in knowledge and self-efficacy across most topics (11 out of 12) and skills (8 out of 10) with demonstrated statistical significance (p < 0.05). Most participants reported positive practice impacts, including enhanced ability to provide PPC in their practice.Conclusion: Project ECHO is a feasible and impactful model for fostering a virtual PPC-focused community of practice among interprofessional HCPs.

Aims: We explore social and relational dynamics tied to an unexplored potentially psychologically traumatic event (PPTE) that can impact nurses’ well-being and sense of their occupational responsibilities: namely, the moral, ethical, or professional dilemmas encountered in their occupational work. Design: We used a semi-constructed grounded theory approach to reveal prevalent emergent themes from the qualitative, open-ended component of our survey response data as part of a larger mixed-methods study. Methods: We administered a national Canadian survey on nurses’ experiences of occupational stressors and their health and well-being between May and September 2019. In the current study, we analyzed data from four open text fields in the PPTE section of the survey. Results: In total, at least 109 participants noted that their most impactful PPTE exposure was a moral, professional, and/or ethical dilemma. These participants volunteered the theme as a spontaneous addition to the list of possible PPTE exposures. Conclusions: Emergent theme analytic results suggest that physicians, other nurses, staff, and/or the decision-making power of patients’ families can reduce or eliminate a nurse’s perception of their agency, which directly and negatively impacts their well-being and may cause them to experience moral injury. Nurses also report struggling when left to operationalize patient care instructions with which they disagree. Impact: Nurses are exposed to PPTEs at work, but little is known about factors that can aggravate PPTE exposure in the field, impact the mental wellness of nurses, and even shape patient care. We discuss the implications of PPTE involving moral, professional, and ethical dilemmas (i.e., potentially morally injurious events), and provide recommendations for nursing policy and practice.

Technology-enhanced active learning (TEAL) spaces could represent a significant benefit to learning and teaching at universities. TEAL spaces support students in projecting presentations (e.g. from smart-phones) and sharing notes (e.g. from smart-watches) with peers. Importantly, this sharing is partly amongst their co-present small group but sometimes to the whole class. However, plugging personal things into smart spaces whose first requirement is to accept as many devices as possible is not without consequence. A projected notification of a political conversation, for example, has the potential to harm the individual both within the space and beyond, opening them to unwanted judgment, criticism and assessment.The traditional argument from the usable security community is that of intervention prior to any use whatever: users need to be trained, taught and/or nudged to avoid such problems. We conducted an informal focus group with students in a pilot TEAL space, exploring issues around the privacy and security of using personal devices in such spaces. The reality is that it is hard to perceive the privacy and security challenges prior to using the space. We argue that such prior interventions are not only a significant barrier to student adoption of smart spaces, but ineffective in ensuring the safety of individuals in the long-term.We argue that in designing smart spaces, both on-campus and off, designers need to adopt an approach of individually evolved privacy requirements to ensure an on-going safe, creative space for students. Two important features are: (a) as a small group develops bonds, its privacy level needs to be reduced over time and (b) the best privacy level depends on the whether the screen is currently shared with the small group or the large class.

As spaces, physical or virtual, are change agents and can have an impact on learning, the power of built pedagogy is being acknowledged in Higher Education. Emphasis is being placed on the design of Active Learning Spaces (ALS) and its impact on pedagogy, by fostering active learning. However, the field is fragmented, due to a profusion of terms for ALS, lacking systematization. This paper presents a systematic literature review on ALS with a focus on the concepts, design principles, teaching and learning strategies, educational resources, assessment criteria and spaces typologies. It aims to map the state of the art and identify common orientations to inform the design and assessment of ALS. The results show that studies in ALS emphasize the centrality of students’ learning through collaborative work and supported by technology-enhanced environments. Despite the profusion of designations, its definitions generally focus on pedagogical strategies, technology-enhanced learning principles, collaborative aspects and interdisciplinarity and transferable skills, albeit with different importance levels. It also shows that research in this area is small-scale and empirically weak. Considering the assessment of ALS usage, future research on the impact of different layouts (pedagogy, furniture, and technology) both on teachers’ practices and on students’ learning is highly recommended.

Although active learning is coming to the forefront of education, the physical infrastructure of classrooms has been relatively slow to change. Certain institutions, including Western University, have recently developed active learning spaces. These learning spaces often include movable furniture and numerous writing spaces, which creates a more interactive learning environment for students. They may range in size and set‐up, but one key feature that these spaces share is a rich opportunity for student collaboration. Previous studies have shown that students perceive active learning spaces as more engaging than traditional lecture spaces; however, the effect of learning spaces on transferable skill development, specifically effective communication, has not yet been investigated. Thus, the main objective of the current study was to evaluate the efficacy of Western’s Active Learning Spaces (WALS) in supporting student development of effective communication as a transferable skill. We recruited students from a fourth‐year undergraduate medical science course (N=33) to participate. The students started the Fall term of 2019 in a fixed‐row classroom and moved to a WALS at the midpoint of the term. The same instructor taught in both classroom environments and the course was designed as a flipped classroom where students are expected to complete online learning modules before coming to class. The current study utilized an explanatory sequential mixed‐methods approach to collect data. Quantitative data was collected first in the form of Likert surveys and classroom observation, followed by qualitative data collection in the form of focus groups. Students were observed using a previously validated instrument entitled, Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) (COPUS). Our observational COPUS data have shown that the instructor successfully created an active learning environment in both the fixed‐row classroom and the WALS and was using similar active learning activities in both environments. Students were asked to complete a Likert survey that measured communication apprehension at the start of the course and after exposure to each classroom setting. In addition, students were asked to complete a Likert survey to rate the impact each classroom had on overall classroom climate and learning. Finally, students were asked to complete a Likert survey indicating their classroom preference and the suitability of each classroom on a variety of items. Our results suggested that many students perceive themselves as having low communication apprehension and we found no significant difference in student responses between the start of the term and after exposure to the fixed‐row classroom. This is likely because students in the fourth year of their undergraduate degree have had exposure to active learning strategies and opportunities to develop their communication skills outside of the current course. Further data collection in the WALS is needed; however, based on other preliminary findings, we predict students will prefer the WALS and will perceive an increase in communication skills after WALS exposure.

A Review of: Dominguez, G. (2016). Beyond gate counts: Seating studies and observations to assess library space usage. New Library World, 117(5/6), 321-328. https://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-08-2015-0058 Abstract Objective – To propose a new method to assess library space usage and the physical library user experience utilizing multiple data collection techniques. Design – Seating usage studies, surveys, and observation. Setting – Large university in the southern United States. Subjects – Students who physically use the library spaces. Methods – The researcher performed seating sweeps three times a day for one week at time, using a counter to get an accurate headcount of each area of the library. The number of users was recorded on paper and then transferred to Excel. A survey for library patrons was created using Typeform and distributed through both email and in-person. In addition, the researcher created a photo diary to document how students were using the space, particularly creative and flexible uses of the library space. These photos were collected to be shared with library administration. The researcher conducted the study twice, once at each main campus library. Main Results – The initial seating sweeps at one location showed an average of 57 to 85 users engaging in active study, and 57% of users engaged in individual study vs. group study. The sweeping study at the second campus location found that floors designated as quiet floors were the most overcrowded. The researcher found that overall, the actual library use surpassed expected library use. The survey results indicated patron concerns about the lack of available seating, noise policies, uncomfortable furniture, and technology issues such as power outlets and Wi-Fi connectivity. Conclusion – The researcher found that utilizing surveys in addition to observational data provided a more complete picture of the user experience. Photographs also provided depth and texture to the observational data. Based on the findings the librarians and administration plan to upgrade furniture and technology options, as well as make changes to the noise policy.