A systematic review protocol on the use of online learning and blended learning for teaching clinical skills to undergraduate health professional students

Aim: This paper is a review protocol that will be used to identify, critically appraise and synthesize the best current evidence relating to the use of online learning and blended learning approaches in teaching clinical skills in undergraduate nursing.

Background: Although previous systematic reviews on online learning versus face to face learning have been undertaken (Cavanaugh et al. 2010, Cook et al. 2010), a systematic review on the impact of online learning and blended learning for teaching clinical skills has yet to be considered in undergraduate nursing. By reviewing nursing students’ online learning experiences, systems can potentially be designed to ensure all students’ are supported appropriately to meet their learning needs.

Methods/Design: The key objectives of the review are to evaluate how online-learning teaching strategies assist nursing students learn; to evaluate the students satisfaction with this form of teaching; to explore the variety of online-learning strategies used; to determine what online-learning strategies are more effective and to determine if supplementary face to face instruction enhances learning. A search of the following databases will be made MEDLINE, CINAHL, BREI, ERIC and AUEI. This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute guidance for systematic reviews of quantitative and qualitative research.

Conclusion: This review intends to report on a combination of student experience and learning outcomes therefore increasing its utility for educators and curriculum developers involved in healthcare education.

Application-Specific Instruction Set Processor for SoC implementation of Modern Signal Processing Algorithms

A novel application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) for use in the construction of modern signal processing systems is presented. This is a flexible device that can be used in the construction of array processor systems for the real-time implementation of functions such as singular-value decomposition (SVD) and QR decomposition (QRD), as well as other important matrix computations. It uses a coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) module to perform arithmetic operations and several approaches are adopted to achieve high performance including pipelining of the micro-rotations, the use of parallel instructions and a dual-bus architecture. In addition, a novel method for scale factor correction is presented which only needs to be applied once at the end of the computation. This also reduces computation time and enhances performance. Methods are described which allow this processor to be used in reduced dimension (i.e., folded) array processor structures that allow tradeoffs between hardware and performance. The net result is a flexible matrix computational processing element (PE) whose functionality can be changed under program control for use in a wider range of scenarios than previous work. Details are presented of the results of a design study, which considers the application of this decomposition PE architecture in a combined SVD/QRD system and demonstrates that a combination of high performance and efficient silicon implementation are achievable. © 2005 IEEE.

CORDIC based application-specific instruction set processor for QRD/SVD

An application specific programmable processor (ASIP) suitable for the real-time implementation of matrix computations such as Singular Value and QR Decomposition is presented. The processor incorporates facilities for the issue of parallel instructions and a dual-bus architecture that are designed to achieve high performance. Internally, it uses a CORDIC module to perform arithmetic operations, with pipelining of the internal recursive loop exploited to multiplex the two independent micro-rotations onto a single piece of hardware. The net result is a flexible processing element whose functionality can be changed under program control, which combines high performance with efficient silicon implementation. This is illustrated through the results of a detailed silicon design study and the applications of the techniques to a combined SVD/QRD system.

Second-Order Training of Adaptive Critics for Online Process Control

A new algorithm for training of nonlinear optimal neuro-controllers (in the form of the model-free, action-dependent, adaptive critic paradigm). Overcomes problems with existing stochastic backpropagation training: need for data storage, parameter shadowing and poor convergence, offering significant benefits for online applications.

Making the law accessible to non-lawyers: effects of different kinds of expertise on perceived usability of online legal information services

To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment - for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project - we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training (p = 0.001), that the number of difficulties and the choice of database affected successful completion, and that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology. Instead, they had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. The results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, with implications for the design of systems to support the effective understanding and use of information.