Alumni Feedback Research Articles

The Learning Collaboratory: developing and evaluating public health students' skills while promoting community health.

Complex and continuous developments in health and healthcare require innovative changes in programs that educate public health scientists and professionals. Public health change agents need critical competencies to confront today and tomorrow's leading problems including leadership, communication, interprofessional practice, and systems thinking. Public Health training programs teach competencies through their applied field experience and culminating project, typically late in the program, and often implemented in isolation from peers and faculty. Objectives and skills do not always align closely with community-based program needs. Students pursuing a degree in science in public health need to deeply comprehend multi-dimensional and interconnected systemic problems and communicate with diverse stakeholders across disciplines to produce relevant community-engaged research. The University of Miami Public Health Learning Collaboratory (LC) was established to transform the learning experience of public health master's students by providing opportunities to develop necessary core skills for effective public health practice early in their training, while applying these skills to address real-world public health needs in the community. Spanning an average of 3 semesters, the LC promotes student involvement in collaborative and impactful capstone and thesis projects. Practice-based teaching and service learning are central approaches to teaching cross-cutting competencies of leadership, communication, problem solving, collaboration, and systems thinking in public health. Significant to the approach is the engagement of previous cohorts of senior students to teach back to junior students, further integrating concepts learned. Long term alumni feedback recognized strengths of the program, including its structure, teamwork & collaboration, critical thinking & problem solving, guidance, nurture & support, teaching back, and content & curriculum. Community partners agreed the LC prepared students to practice in the field of public health. The LC is a promising model for master's level public health education and community application, given the opportunities it provides to strengthen and integrate students' public health skills in a supportive environment, and enhance the transferability and sustainability of student and faculty's community public health work.

An integrated evidence-based approach to provide a practicum-based learning experience to students

Abstract Background Due to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the public health field has an exceptional opportunity not only to address current challenges but also to rebuild and expand the workforce. Objectives The main objective of this presentation is to highlight the 2018-2022 academic year's progress of the practice-based learning experience of the JPH College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University in Georgia, USA. The College serves more than 59, mostly rural counties, and involves diverse practicum preceptors, students, and existing professionals from the USA and other countries. The College provides a unique opportunity for students to develop practice-based education and training to master public health competencies in the field. The Office of Practice and Research collaborates with two Practicum coordinators on the undergraduate and graduate levels to create, support, sustain, and expand practicum opportunities locally and globally. Results The Practicum has created more than 17 community partnerships that provide an ongoing Practicum opportunity on all three program levels (BSPH, MPH, DrPH). It fostered relationships between community organizations and academia to collaborate on research, interventions, and grants. It includes professional workshops, information sessions, and mentoring to adequately prepare students for the fieldwork. In addition, it incorporates 1) an advisory board committee; 2) supervisor's evaluations; and 3) alumni feedback. As a result of this program and other efforts, more than 80% of our students are employed or enrolled in further education within the defined period. Conclusions This scalable and adaptable program serves as a model for advancing academia-community efforts aiming to successfully prepare students for entering the workforce, as well as enhancing the knowledge and skills of those in the workforce, particularly those working in/plan to work in challenging rural and related settings. Key messages • Practicum is essential in the successful preparation of students for entering the workforce. • Practicum provides a unique opportunity for collaboration between community organizations and academia.

Master of Public Health in Health Equity and Criminal Justice: Student and Alumni Feedback on the Development of a New Master of Public Health Concentration.

Purpose: To describe Master of Public Health (MPH) student and alumni interest in a new Health Equity and Criminal Justice (HECJ) concentration, highlight their personal experiences with mass incarceration, and summarize their input on developing the concentration.Methods: From July to October 2017 current MPH students and alumni at Touro University California (Vallejo, CA) were electronically surveyed.Results: The 152 respondents included those who had focused exclusively on public health, and those who concurrently obtained clinical degrees in osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, or physician assistant studies. Approximately 90% of the current and former students surveyed believed HECJ to be an integral part of public health, and one in three respondents described being personally impacted by incarceration. More than half (64%) were interested in the HECJ concentration, and 81% of those respondents were interested in completing their field study internship at a correctional facility.Conclusion: The HECJ concentration will fill an educational gap and may provide a pedagogical model for training a future generation of public health professionals to mitigate the health impacts of the U.S. mass incarceration epidemic.

Using Teach Back Tutorials to Overcome Pandemic Learning Gaps

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of gaps in students’ knowledge at the time they enter a comprehensive Information Systems cap-stone course. This problem of knowledge gaps was exacerbated by the forced remote learning and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim was to find a technique that would identify and fill those gaps. Ideally, the method would also reinforce the students’ interpersonal soft skills. Background: Many universities have a capstone course where students may apply their knowledge from the curriculum to a project, and they are evaluated on their retention of knowledge from the core classes. Over the past two years, students have experienced course interruptions and modifications due to the pandemic, resulting in learning gaps on topics covered in the core courses. Depending on the project’s scope and curriculum, this may prevent students from conversing on many essential concepts during the capstone course. By requiring students to create “Teach Back” tutorials on materials from their core courses, faculty may ensure that the key concepts are discussed multiple times within the curriculum. Methodology: We present a case study to identify key concepts and compare cohort results before and after implementation. Contribution: A process for identifying potential knowledge gaps is identified, and a method to repeatedly expose students to concepts is introduced. Findings: There were improvements to the overall capstone scores after the tutorial implementation. While many factors influence changes in scores across cohorts, the initial findings are promising, supporting the concept that teaching back helps to close knowledge gaps. Recommendations for Practitioners: Faculty should collaborate to identify knowledge areas that need to be rein-forced later in their students’ academic careers. Teaching back essential concepts that may not be prioritized in implementing a capstone project ensures a repeated exposure to the identified concepts. Recommendations for Researchers: There needs to be a priority to teach students to be lifelong learners and to teach the skills needed to share their knowledge with future coworkers. There needs to be more research into a pedagogy that builds these essential soft skills within our curriculum. Finally, research into alumni feedback on course topics and pedagogy is needed. Impact on Society: Introducing pedagogy that improves both knowledge and soft skills, this re-search looks to build individuals who will learn independently and be able to communicate with and improve others. Future Research: There needs to be additional research to study the changes in technical knowledge before and after Teach Back, the consequences of elective sequencing, the consideration of elective versus required courses, and the use of Teach Back to capture student knowledge gained from completing diverse electives prior to the capstone course.

Exploring the Factors Affecting Students’ Choice of Higher Education Institutes in India: A Factor Analysis Approach

The study seeks to identify and explore those factors the students consider while selecting a higher education institute or a university. The study is based on quantitative data as well as qualitative data. Individual interviews were conducted with subject experts and students. The data for analysis was collected from 212 students of the Indore region by using a structured questionnaire and judgemental sampling technique. With the help of exploratory study discovered eight factors were analysed namely– past placement record and programme design, college working hours and well-resourced library, co-curricular activities and alumni feedback, faculty expertise, benefits and expenditure, state-of-the-art, supportive staff, and additional facilities; that are considered while choosing a higher education institute. These eight factors were further examined through a confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the proposed model. An eight-factor model consisting of the factors affecting the students’ choice of higher education institutes.

Towards Designing a Validated Framework for Improved Clinical Legal Education: Empirical Research on Student and Alumni Feedback

The pedagogical advantages of employing a Clinical Legal Education (“CLE”) teaching and learning strategy have been acclaimed in literature for almost a century and it continues to be ideally suited to cater to modern education expectations. As an agent for social change, CLE offers law students an effective gateway to participate in, and be influenced by, fundamental social justice problems while it also improves access to justice for the indigent. Though the clinical literature is replete on expected benefits for clinical law students, very little (if any) verifiable empirical research, independently sourced and evaluated, has been published to assess the veracity of these claims in support of CLE. After receiving a funding grant from the University of Stellenbosch Fund for Innovation and Research into Learning and Teaching, the University of Stellenbosch Law Clinic appointed an independent, external agency to conduct empirical research through an extensive measure and evaluation exercise. The aim of the project was to source, document and analyse robust empirical research data about the Faculty of Law’s CLE module, Practical Legal Training 471. The project involved the sourcing and collation of formal student evaluation feedback reports spanning a period of nine years. Additional alumni and current student data were gathered either by online questionnaire or by telephonic interview. The research was aimed at eliciting quantitative as well as qualitative responses.
 The purpose of this article is to describe the applicable methodology and aims of the research project, to unpack and discuss the resulting empirical data, and to draw certain conclusions based on the findings of this research about CLE’s impact on law students’ experience specifically relating to their practice-readiness and social justice sensitivities. It is suggested that this research will prove both interesting and useful to law teachers involved in relevant programmes at other higher education institutions. The data and evidence detailed herein will assist them to conduct their research and to make substantiated recommendations for the development of CLE programs on a broader national and international level. This research will also add to the body of knowledge on students and student learning and allow for recommendations regarding the creation of a broader implementation framework for improved CLE.

Recommendation of Distance Education Colleges to Students based on Alumni Feedback

Sentiment Analysis (SA) systems are very common because most people trust it based on the opinions, emotions, attitudes and feelings shared by the users for decision making purposes about the product, service, news analytics etc. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is used to automatically detect and classify sentiments into positive, negative or neutral opinion on product or service through certain algorithms. The expeditious growth of internet leads to the increase of reviews about product, services, movies, restaurants or vacation destinations and organizations. In order to increase or decrease the market value of the product, spammers may give the fake ratings. Sentiment Analysis system face great difficulties in deploying the algorithms to classify each review as either honest review, posted by the customers after using the products, or spam review, posted by the individual spammer or spammer groups. Another major challenge faced by the sentiment analysis system is that it lacks the accuracy of predicting implicit and explicit features present in the dataset is low, which is the major challenge in opinion mining system. The proposed system deals with text pre-processing which helps in improving the overall performance of the sentiment analysis systems and an effective system is developed to identify the fake reviews present in the dataset. Association Rule Mining along with K-Means clustering is used to achieve higher efficiency in classification of implicit and explicit features. Lexicon method is used for the classification of sentiments into positive and negative polarities. The advantage of proposed system is that, it can identify and remove the fake reviews in the dataset and extraction of both implicit and explicit feature can be identified through Lexicon based Method along with its polarities.

English for Occupational Purposes for Arts Students: Alumni Feedback

Alumni feedback is an important means of determining whether a course is of relevance to the students’ needs. One of the courses that would benefit from their feedback is English for Occupational Purposes. Based on the practice at the workplace, graduates can provide information whether what was taught could be applied to their working environment. This study seeks to ascertain whether an EOP course is relevant to the needs of the graduates. A questionnaire survey was conducted, and a total of thirty alumni of an Arts Faculty responded to the survey. The findings indicate that the students benefited from the course, but a number of improvements can be made to make the course more effective. The study also highlighted the form of language used at work. The use of standard English, Malaysian English and Malay were found to be the highest in making small talks.

Physician assistant anatomy education: does prior anatomy experience predict performance?

Anatomy education in the Duke Physician Assistant (PA) program has been historically prosection‐based and heavily clinically oriented. Based on alumni feedback, in 2009 this course was transformed into a foundational anatomy course with studentperformed dissection. As part of this modification, data were collected describing incoming students’ prior anatomy experience. These data were used to combine experienced and non‐experienced students into lab groups to optimize group learning and maximize lab resource use. At present we have three years of data for students in this new anatomy curriculum. These data also allow us to evaluate whether past experience predicts course performance and/or performance on the Physician Assistant Clinical Knowledge Rating and Assessment Tool (PACKRAT). Relationships between experience (e.g., number of semesters, dissection vs. prosection) and performance in the course and on the PACKRAT were examined using linear regression analysis and ANOVA. Contrary to our initial expectations, results indicate that prior anatomy experience is not a significant (P>;0.05) predictor of anatomy performance or PACKRAT scores. However, anatomy performance was significantly related to performance on the PACKRAT. We suggest there may multiple potential confounding factors that could be related to these outcomes, which will be incorporated into future analyses.Grant Funding Source: n/aSubmitted to PAEA 5/25/2012 (bqmelcher)

Academic perceptions of quality and quality assurance in undergraduate hospitality, tourism and leisure programmes: A comparison of UK and Taiwanese programmes

This study explores and compares academic perspectives of quality assurance and its procedures to evaluate undergraduate hospitality, tourism and leisure programmes (HTLPs) in both the UK and Taiwanese higher education systems. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted to identify academic key concerns and issues about HTLP quality. Additionally, a questionnaire survey was used to assess academic perceptions regarding the quality of HTLP provision in the aspects of strategic planning, curriculum and instruction, faculty, student achievement, resources, and administrative management. The results indicated that overall HTLP quality was perceived as satisfactory in both countries. The specific areas of ‘curriculum and instruction’ and ‘resources’ were commonly perceived as good quality, while relatively poor sub-dimensions such as ‘alumni feedback’ and ‘teacher performance’ were identified as areas requiring special attention for improving programme quality. The implications of this study provide useful insights into quality improvement and enhancement in HTLPs.

A Small College Geology Program — Is Success Possible?

Small colleges can develop viable geology programs, if three basic principles are followed: provide a broadly based appeal, work in close cooperation with other departments and administration, and develop realistic innovative approaches to curriculum, with strong alumni feedback.

Alumni Feedback and Curriculum Revision

Alumni Feedback and Curriculum Revision