Level Elective Course Research Articles

Expanding Environmental Care Competencies for Future and Current Healthcare Providers.

The multiple impacts of the environment on the health of populations can oftentimes be clouded by the daily care practices of healthcare providers. This case study describes an innovative graduate level elective course that uses a problem-based approach to apply evidence-based principles of environmental health to the care of populations. Initial implementation of the course, over two cohorts in 2023, had primarily second-degree undergraduate nursing students. Lessons learned included the necessity to provide peer-to-peer support for several of the graduate level assignments. Positive student outcomes included an expanded understanding of the three main content areas of the course: (1) how soil, air, and water must be considered in individual and population-centered care; (2) the impact of the design of the built and healthcare built environment; and (3) considerations of planetary health for sustainability and mitigation. Faculty outcomes included coaching of undergraduate students in this graduate course and the development of peer-to-peer mentoring activities.

What are we teaching in spirituality and social work elective courses? A qualitative content analysis of BSW syllabi

ABSTRACT Religion and spirituality (RS) are vital aspects of client identity and well-being, yet social work professionals are often ill-equipped to address these in practice due to a lack of specialized training. The National Association of Social Work (NASW) and Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) support integrating RS content into social work curriculum, but existing research focuses on Master of Social Work (MSW)-level elective courses. This qualitative study addresses Bachelor of Social Work (BSW)-level integration by (a) exploring how many accredited BSW programs offer an elective course on RS and (b) analyzing syllabi from these courses to determine specific strategies for teaching RS topics. BSW programs can use the study results as a guide for planning and structuring RS content within their curriculum.

The Effect of Experiential Social Entrepreneurship Education on Intention Formation in Students

This paper posits that social entrepreneurship education can increase the propensity of students to launch social enterprises through a process of experiential learning in which students co-create shared communities of practice. Data from 175 participants in Master level elective courses indicates that participation in social entrepreneurship courses increases self-efficacy, perceived social support and social entrepreneurial intentions. No statistically significant effects were found for empathy or moral obligation. In addition, drawing on a sample of 265 participants in a massive open online course, it was demonstrated that the more students engage in experiential learning activities, the larger the observed effects.

Development, delivery and evaluation of a social work elective offered in a hospital setting

Abstract: This paper describes a qualitative study about a Master’s level elective course offered on-site at a Canadian pediatric hospital and delivered by frontline hospital social workers. Ten social workers and four students participated in the study which captured their experiences in the course. A grounded theory approach guided this study. Social workers discussed an enhanced sense of professional self, impact on their daily roles and various opportunities resulting from participation. Students discussed diversity, development of a realistic understanding of the social work role and the unique format of the course. Implications for future course development and university-agency partnerships are discussed.Keywords: social work; education; pediatrics; hospital; teaching

Virtual virus, a semester-long interdisciplinary project on the crossroads of creativity and knowledge integration.

Virtual virus is a semester-long interdisciplinary project offered as part of upper level elective course in virology. Students are challenged to apply key concepts from multiple biological sub-disciplines to 'synthesize' a plausible virtual virus. The project is executed as a scaffolded series of hands-on sessions and mini-projects that are integrated into continuous story leading to mock conference presentation and comprehensive report modeling article publication. It complements classroom instruction helping students to meet overarching learning targets traditionally associated undergraduate virology courses such as viral structure and function, mode of viral propagation and flow of genetic information and virus/host interactions on the cellular and organismal level. Formal instructor and informal peer feedback were used as tools to prompt reflection and guide revisions of the final report. Student learning gains and attitudes toward the approach were studied by evaluating project work product and end of the semester survey. Outcome analysis demonstrated that students exit the course with elaborated conceptual understanding of viruses and ownership of their work. The project can be viewed as an approach to model the process of scientific discovery in fast-forward mode by combining active learning, creativity and problem solving to assemble and communicate a virtual virus story.

Resource Wars: An On the Ground Understanding of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in Appalachia, West Virginia

This article sketches student responses and subsequent political action to directly witnessing the tragedy of Mountaintop Coal Mining (MTR) on Kayford Mountain in West Virginia. I have created an "engaged anthropological curriculum" as part of my Resource Wars of 21st Century (an upper level elective course) where students spend four days on an active battlefield in order to a) expose students first-hand to the stories and testimonials of social, economic, physical degradation caused by MTR.

Using Digital Earth to Expose Students to GIScience

Students in U.S. geography programs face particular challenges that may discourage them from taking advanced GIScience courses and considering geospatial careers. This article provides a preliminary discussion of the development, delivery, and evaluation of a University of Colorado Colorado Springs sophomore-level, required geography course designed to address this concern. The course, Digital Earth (DE), introduces students to the principles, concepts, and applications of major geographic information technologies (GITs) early in their academic careers. The success of DE is evaluated by examining the extent to which the course excited students about GIScience and motivated them to take higher level elective geospatial courses. Results suggest that DE generates considerable student interest in GIScience, prepares students reasonably well for elective courses, and greatly inspires them to seek a geospatial career.

Elements of Nanotechnology Education in Engineering Curriculum Worldwide

Nanotechnology has developed by leaps and bounds due to potential high impacts of its application in the world today. Nanotechnology has many potential benefits including energy savings, alternative energy supplies, efficient use of raw materials, environmental protection, agriculture applications and medical breakthroughs. All of these applications are related to engineering. Thus, it is important that nanotechnology be taught during undergraduate for engineering students to prepare then in career related to nanotechnology. In this paper, a comparative study of the nanotechnology course contents from several universities in the world is made. Courses on nanotechnology in undergraduate level for engineering are typically taught either as a common course or junior/senior level elective course. The common course of nanotechnology in engineering requires the entire engineering student to take this course for the understanding of the fundamental and introduction to nanotechnology, where the pre-requisite courses are pre-university Physics, Chemistry or Biology. For the 3rd/4thyear level elective courses, students typically choose the elective course of nanotechnology with the requirement of some pre-requisite subjects. Comparison between Malaysian universities and other universities in USA, UK, Singapore and Australia shows that engineering curriculum within Malaysian universities are lagging behind in terms of offering nanotechnology exposure through courses at the undergraduate level.

On the Design of Elective Courses in rf and Communications According to the Needs of Industry

Industry expectations for graduates in RF and Communication engineering become important issue in today's competitive job market. Thought in RF and Communication engineering education in the universities in Turkey, there is a gap between the contents of elective courses and industry expectations. This may cause a failure for graduates when they meet real working environment. Study as presented in this article may fill these gaps between the candidate engineer's skills and industry needs. According to industry requirements, senior level elective courses in RF and Communications will be re-designed. In this context, technical and non-technical skills in the national job market for the communication engineers are collected and a survey conducted to the graduates for weighting the skills according to their experiences at work. Then, a priority list, which is comprised by weighted skills in industry requirements, is prepared and presented to students as a questionnaire at the beginning of the semester. This questionnaire is made to assess students' abilities relative to industry requirements, in other words, awareness of the students are determined before taking the elective courses. The result of the study is discussed and it is indicated that students are lack of required skills. By analysing results of this study, improvements in the content of the courses could be started. This study may be useful to produce qualified communication engineers at Atilim University as required by the industry.

Competition between student groups in the protein production challenge

Converting biological discoveries into commercial-scale processes requires that graduating chemical engineers obtain an understanding of modern bioprocess principles. This paper describes the development and implementation of a 5-week long protein production project into a multidisciplinary upper level elective course on bioprocess engineering. The protein production project was developed and implemented during the Fall 2006 semester and repeated during the Fall 2007 semester. A key element of the protein production project was the competition between student groups. Group performance was rated using a production rubric, and the team with the highest score was guaranteed an “A” on the project. The rubric included equipment rental costs and production bonuses for producing large quantities of protein of high purity. The equipment rental costs were carefully determined to encourage continued student experimentation in the laboratory. The competitive nature of the project captures students driven by achievement or instrumental types of motivation, which are not necessarily engaged by traditional problem-solving homework assignments. Final exam results for the course with the protein production challenge were compared to previous course offerings which used a literature review project, in an attempt to evaluate the impact of the project on student performance. No statistically significant conclusions could be drawn but the results suggested that the protein production challenge was at least as effective as the previous project. In addition, the course evaluation survey showed the protein production challenge was the single most popular aspect of the course.

Measuring Online Students' Ability To Apply Programming Theory: Are Web Courses Really Working?

As a response to troubling doubts about the success of Web-delivered courses that include problem solving and critical thinking skills, the authors gathered data from two online sections of the CIS Application Programming with Visual Basic course at Metropolitan State College of Denver over two semesters and compared it with the data from classroom sections. T-tests showed a significant difference in the means of student projects and tests that required application of theory learned. All sections of the course used the same syllabus and assignments and were taught by the same instructor. Internet students scored significantly lower in theory portions of exams and in projects. The authors conclude that more study is needed, but design and delivery of problem solving courses via the Web needs careful attention. INTRODUCTION As we move into the 21 century, educators know that Web courses at institutions everywhere are here to stay. The last decade of the 20 century saw a mad rush to put college courses, and entire college curricula online so that students could earn an entire degree without setting foot on a campus. Initial evaluations and statistical analyses consistently pointed to equality between classroom and the Web courses. Time and again, no significant differences were found in final grades between Web and classroom delivery of courses. The general consensus was that Web courses were working, and that colleges were justified in forging ahead with plans to put entire curricula online. The first courses to be put online in Information Systems departments were generally the lower level elective courses and courses which were survey or retention-oriented courses. That is, the material of the first computer literacy course, the first information systems survey course, introduction to the Internet, productivity software courses, and self-paced courses was simpler to port to the Web environment. An average knowledge of instructional design and a crash course in Web page editing with Front Page®, or even Web CT® or other course authoring software, was enough to move these “to-do list” type of courses to the Web. The actual content of the course was not within the Web pages of the course, but in textbooks and assigned readings listed on the course Web pages. When faced with putting courses that involve problem solving and higher analytical reasoning on the Web, there was concern that the initial success of the first Internet courses would not be repeated. Was there something missing? If so, it should be identified and action could be taken. It was time to re-examine the first successes of Web course deployment, and move to examining online courses in more depth. Are all Web courses working? And if not, why?

Infusing Technology in Educational Foundations

In this paper, the author describes the use of technology in two educational foundations courses. One course, “Social Foundations of American Education,” is an undergraduate core requirement that enrolls 30–60 preservice teachers. On the other hand, “Pedagogy, Equality of Opportunity, and the Education of Blacks in the U.S.” is a graduate level elective foundations course that enrolls 8–12 senior-level or graduate students. Presentation software (PowerPoint), Internet and Web resources, and audio and video recordings are examples of multimedia instructional technologies that are incorporated into one or both courses. The author goes beyond mere description of how technology tools are used by uncovering the ways in which classroom environment and technology access influence their use, as does the instructor’s theoretical groundings.

Teaching an introductory computer graphics course using OpenGL

In the past, introductory graphics courses focused traditionally on algorithms for drawing points, lines and polygons using low-level or system specific commands. This approach has become dated with the introduction of OpenGL and other high level 3D graphics application programming interfaces (API). OpenGL is an API that provides access to graphics hardware through functions common to 3D graphical applications. This tutorial focuses on using OpenGL to teach a junior/senior level elective course in computer graphics. Both OpenGL programming techniques and the design of a high level 3D graphics API such as OpenGL will be covered.

An Interdisciplinary Course Centered on Student Debate of Current Environmental Issues

This paper presents an active-learning approach applied to an upper level elective course titled Human Societies & Environment, which draws its subject matter from a variety of disciplines in the social and natural sciences. The paper recognizes that the desire to discuss current environmental issues is a significant learning motive, and experiments with a coursework design centered on a set of regularly convened student debate sessions. A student moderator conducts the debates between two teams of students. Lectures, Internet searches, numerical analysis, and research projects form supporting activities that serve to organize and inform the debates as well as to consolidate pedagogic value of the course.

Teaching Image Computation in an Upper Level Elective on Robotics

This article offers a case study of how to teach image computation in an upper level elective course on robotics with a significant number of non-Computer Science majors. The MACS 415 course at the Colorado School of Mines is required for the popular interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Robotics and AI. It is mandated to provide a broad survey of the artificial intelligence tools available to roboticists, including image computation. Teaching image computation in a robotics elective is challenging both because of the limited time that can be spent on computer vision, and because of the attributes of the students. Non-CS majors typically do not have enough programming experience to program DSP algorithms, yet the students' preferred learning style is "hands-on." In order to reconcile this dilemma, we (1) cover a broad set of topics in class, (2) have several laboratory assignments using khoros, and (3) require the students to complete a robot project involving computer vision. The article summarizes the lessons learned to date, which are expected to be applicable to any course with non-majors involving image computation.

An elective microwave course sequence with integrated laboratory

A description is given of a three-quarters senior/first-year-graduate level elective microwave course sequence with integrated laboratory. The course sequence is designed to provide an in-depth understanding of theoretical and practical microwave engineering fundamentals which will enable students to make an immediate transition into an industrial environment and will provide a strong foundation for continuing graduate studies in RF and microwave engineering. The course sequence affords students the opportunity for much hands-on-design experience with state-of-the-art equipment. >

Noise control education at Iowa State University

Noise control education for engineering students at Iowa State University consists of two formal courses devoted to the area of noise control, a number of supporting courses in related areas and research or design experience involving industrial noise control problems. The development of this educational package and the various levels of undergraduate and graduate student participation in the package are discussed. This highly informal program in noise control attempts to serve the needs of students who desire an introduction to the concepts of noise control as well as those of students who wish to informally specialize in the area of noise control. The core of noise control education for both groups is a senior level elective course which incorporates formal lecture‐recitation instruction, text book problems, laboratory experience and actual industrial noise control design problems. The content and organization of this course will be discussed and examples of typical laboratory and project work will be presented. Supporting courses in related areas and an introductory graduate course in noise source analysis are also summarized.