Re-designed Course Research Articles

Developing mental health and addiction competencies in social work students using simulation-based learning

ABSTRACT Social workers are one of the core professionals on the mental health workforce and most work with individuals, families, and communities with mental health and addiction concerns. Schools of social work have a responsibility to adequately prepare students for practice in the field of mental health and addictions, but there are gaps in social work education and training. This paper describes a social work practice in mental health course that has been re-designed to focus on developing student competence in mental health, addictions, and suicide risk assessment. We formed an advisory committee consisting of faculty, MSW and PhD students, as well as community social workers. The re-designed course uses simulation-based learning and a form of blended learning known as a flipped classroom approach. We developed educational online modules that provide opportunities for students to increase knowledge on mental health and addictions and give more time to focus on practice in the classroom. Simulation-based learning provides students with opportunities to practice in the classroom with a simulated client. This paper will describe how simulation can be used to teach and assess mental health and addiction competencies. We will discuss implications for social work education and practice.

Implementation of Agile Methodologies in an Engineering Course

At present, a new generation of students is studying at universities with their specific abilities and skills. In addition to hard skills, potential employers also require significantly developed soft skills from their employees. The school, and not just the university, is entering this process in a different position than in the past due to the changing requirements placed on it. Activities in the school environment must adapt to emerging trends. This article explains how present-day requirements on graduates and specifics of the new generation of students challenge the approach to education. In order to increase the efficiency and attractiveness of the educational process, the SCRUM framework has been implemented into course Mathematics 1. The re-designed course was implemented and validated by an experimental group of students in the academic year 2019/2020. Two questionnaire analyses and a comparison of learning outcomes were conducted to find out the answers to research questions. The results of students indicate that agile methodologies are useful for increasing the efficiency of the educational process. The paper offers our proposal for the introduction of agile methodology into the educational process and our first-hand experience with this way of teaching and its impact on the studying results of the experimental group and, last but not least, suggestions for possible improvements.

Social work practice education and training during the pandemic: Disruptions and discoveries.

The COVID-19 pandemic evoked a disruption to social work (SW) practice education and this brief note describes discoveries made in teaching SW practice virtually. One example is Virtual Practice Fridays, adapted to build SW practice competencies online, and another example is a re-designed course on cross-cultural SW practice using simulation-based learning.

Engineering Elective Course Re-design to Promote Student Engagement

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for Engineering Design, is a 4th year mechanical engineering elective course. The course goal is for course graduates to be able to effectively use computer simulation tools to select optimal engineering designs based on the analysis of fluid flow performance. After being well received for many years, over several course offerings the class attendance, the student engagement in lectures, the student demonstration of key course concepts in the final summative project, and the student course evaluation scores all dropped.From student feedback to specific questions during the student course evaluation it was found that the students believed that their existing understanding of engineering fluid mechanics was sufficient to make well-informed design decisions and that the emphasized course concepts were not relevant to the engineering design process. This feedback informed a course re-design.After briefly describing the course context and objectives and the motivation theory that guided this course re-design, the two major features of the course re-design, pre/post-test activities and authentic engineering assignments, are described in some detail. Finally the impact of the re-design on student performance and outcomes from three offerings of the re-designed course is presented.

Learning to teach scientific practices: pedagogical decisions and reflections during a course for pre-service science teachers

This auto-ethnographic study describes research conducted in a science teacher education program at a state university in Turkey, where I had taught the ‘laboratory applications’ course for the four previous years. While the students learned the basic skills needed to implement a laboratory course, I detected some deficiencies in their understanding of scientific practices. Consequently, I decided to adopt a different approach. In the fall of 2013 to 2014, I participated in a project aimed at improving pre-service science teachers’ understanding of scientific practices (SPs) using a model known as the Benzene Ring Heuristic (Erduran and Dagher 2014). This project helped me to re-design my course, emphasizing the integration of SPs into lesson planning and teaching. As I taught the re-designed course, I gathered data from various sources, including pre- and post-interviews, audiotape recordings of lessons, students’ lesson plans and reflections, and my own and my colleague’s reflections after teaching. The data suggest that my students’ understanding of SPs improved, but I was still not satisfied with their understanding of domain specificity, ethics, and utility in science, or with their beliefs about the roles and responsibilities of students during science lessons. These are issues to be dealt with as I continue to try to improve the course.

Blended learning and curriculum renewal across three medical schools: The rheumatology module at the University of Otago

<span>In response to the challenges created by the implementation of a new medical school curriculum at the University of Otago in 2008, we aimed to develop a blended learning course for teaching rheumatology within the existing musculoskeletal course. We developed a multimedia online learning resource structured to support class based problem-based learning (PBL) sessions, and enhance student engagement and promote clinical reasoning. We also aimed to align teaching over three geographically separate campuses, promote more student-centred approaches to learning and meet the challenge of the limited teaching time available for undergraduate learning in the field of rheumatology. Our redesigned course was evaluated longitudinally over eighteen months through student focus groups, </span><em>Blackboard</em><span> and </span><em>Moodle</em><span> electronic access data, and course evaluation questionnaires. The data collected indicated an overwhelmingly positive response to the changes in teaching methods. Online materials integrated into the new curriculum and combined with in-class PBL and clinical sessions, proved popular with students. Students accessed the newly developed online materials far more frequently than the previously available unstructured content, which they felt to be of limited value or relevance to their studies. Furthermore the blended learning approach allowed delivery of common content across three separate campuses.</span>

(Re)Conceptualizing Design Approaches for Mobile Language Learning

An exploratory study conducted at George Brown College in Toronto, Canada between 2007 and 2009 investigated language learning with mobile devices as an approach to augmenting ESP learning by taking learning outside the classroom into the real-world context. In common with findings at other community colleges, this study identified inadequate language proficiency, particularly in speaking and listening skills, as a major barrier for ESL college learners seeking employment, or employers hiring and retaining immigrants as employees (CIITE, 2004; Palalas, 2009). As a result of these findings, language support was designed to provide English language instruction going beyond the standard 52-hour course: a hybrid English for Accounting course encompassing in-class, online and mobile-assisted ESP instruction. This paper reports on the pilot study of the mobile component of this re-designed course, which represents the first stage of an on-going Design-Based Research (DBR) study. Discussion is also offered of a new learning theory which we have called Ecological Constructivism (Hoven, 2008; Jakobsdottir, McKeown & Hoven, 2010), devised to incorporate the multiple dimensions of Ecological Linguistics and Constructivism in the situated and context-embedded learning engendered by these new uses of mobile devices.

Business Technology Management: A Case Study

This paper describes how we integrated two courses and two disciplines into a single, required “hands-on” course for undergraduates studying management science (MS) and management information systems (MIS). The motivation for what was initially an experiment (and is now a permanent part of the curriculum) was to exploit the synergy between the analytical approaches to modeling, decision-making and project management that are the mainstay of MS with the increasingly rigorous discipline of business technology management and that field's models, methods, tools and techniques. We describe the previous two courses, the re-designed course and several examples of how management science methods, tools and techniques were used to solve real business technology management problems selected by Villanova University's Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO).