Becoming a caring nurse : the heart of the matter in nurse education

This thesis in caring science didactics is based on a thinking, where the fundamental basis for the didactic is science-based, i.e. it does not emanate from the nursing profession but brings forward a didactic that grows out of caring science and its core substance and ethos. This view on didactics arises from the caritative theory developed by Eriksson. The overall aim of the study is to clarify the meaning and essence of understanding, as well as to explore and deepen the understanding of student nurses' processes of understanding and becoming with the intention of developing a theory model for caring didactics. The overarching research questions are: What is the essence of understanding (of caring science knowledge)? What are the possibilities and importance of understanding in the appropriation of caring science? What characterizes and impels the process of becoming? The thesis consists of four sub studies and a summary section. The overall methodological approach is hermeneutic involving quantitative as well as qualitative methods. The data for the study has been collected through a longitudinal research project that followed student nurses at three universities during their entire education. The empirical sub studies form the basis for the interpreted knowledge that is formulated in the new understanding. This new understanding have, through additional theory-charging with the theory fragments from Gadamer, generated the heuristic synthesis which is illustrated in the theory model. The findings shows that understanding can be described as something unlimited, as an endless movement, which can be illustrated as a lying eighth, a lemniscate. The lemiscate of understanding is characterized by seeing, knowing and becoming and consists of seven differently named phases; the acquired horizon of understanding, the encounter of horizons, the dialogue of horizons, the fusion of horizons, application, reflection and shaping a new horizon of understanding. Bildung (formation), is the ultimate imprint of the endless spiral movement of understanding. Ethos and arête constitute the hubs around which the lemniscate of understanding circles. These include the spirit and driving force that the student carries within. The caring culture encloses the lemniscate of understanding. The caring culture provides the life space of understanding and the prevailing basic values are evinced in the culture.

Evaluating the Strategic Objectives of Cameroonian Higher Education: An application of the Balanced Scorecard

Contemporary higher education operates in an environment of dwindling and parsimonious resources; the increasing need for accountability and relevance to varying stakeholders with differing expectations. These relatively new trends in higher education have been faced by business organizations which have developed different ways of operating in response. This study outlines one way by which business organizations have addressed similar circumstances to show how the Cameroon higher education (HE) could learn from business organizations to manage strategic objectives. The balanced scorecard (BSC) has been used by business organizations to address similar trends. This study evaluates the strategic objectives of Cameroonian higher education using the balanced scorecard. The system level is used to identify the general strategic objectives and one state university is used to represent the translation and implementation of the objectives at the institution level. The BSC principles used include: operational strategic objectives; organizational alignment to the strategy; making strategy everyone’s everyday job; making strategy continual and; mobilizing the leadership for change. The underlying concepts in these principles are communication, consensus, relevance, and a participatory approach. The study employs data from policy documents, relevant literature, websites and semi-structured interviews. The research approach is qualitative and the analyses are done by making meaning of phenomena in their natural contexts. The results show that there is a general knowledge of the strategic objectives but there is disagreement on the relevance of these objectives to HE and on the type of approaches used in implementing the objectives. It was also found that the relevant stakeholders are known, but not all the respondents agree on the importance of these stakeholders. All stakeholders do not have the same level of influence-the state is the most influential. Reporting is sufficiently done but there are insufficient provisions for feedback from stakeholders. The study concludes that the BSC principles can be applied to the management of strategic objectives in Cameroon HE. For Cameroonian higher education, it is recommended that the focus should be first, on developing tools for strategy before the strategy itself. Even though the need for the BSC is confirmed the context does not seem sufficiently ready to implement the BSC as a strategic management tool. The proposed BSC framework can only be used as a communication tool. The barriers to managing strategic objectives in Cameroon HE are related to the communication, consensus, clarity and relevance. However, the system has prospects for improved management and eventual adoption of the BSC as both a strategic management and communication tool. In line with other BSC applications to higher education, this study concluded that it is more feasible to apply the balanced scorecard to a single higher education institution than to a higher education system. The study makes a contribution to the BSC by showing how its principles can be used in a non-business context. The study also opens up possibilities for future research on the same topic in a different context or the same context with a wider scope (more institutions and respondents); the same study with a deeper focus on the interrelationships between the different strategic objectives (strategy maps). The study could also be extended by including the perspectives of the identified stakeholders who are not directly part of the higher education system but constitute the environment in which higher education operates.

User Experience of Geocaching and Its Application to Tourism and Education

Advances in technology have provided new ways of using entertainment and game technology to foster human interaction. Games and playing with games have always been an important part of people’s everyday lives. Traditionally, human-computer interaction (HCI) research was seen as a psychological cognitive science focused on human factors, with engineering sciences as the computer science part of it. Although cognitive science has made significant progress over the past decade, the influence of people’s emotions on design networks is increasingly important, especially when the primary goal is to challenge and entertain users (Norman 2002). Game developers have explored the key issues in game design and identified that the driving force in the success of games is user experience. User-centered design integrates knowledge of users’ activity practices, needs, and preferences into the design process. Geocaching is a location-based treasure hunt game created by a community of players. Players use GPS (Global Position System) technology to find “treasures” and create their own geocaches; the game can be developed when the players invent caches and used more imagination to creations the caches. This doctoral dissertation explores user experience of geocaching and its applications in tourism and education. Globally, based on the Geocaching.com webpage, geocaching has been played about 180 countries and there are more than 10 million registered geocachers worldwide (Geocaching.com, 25.11.2014). This dissertation develops and presents an interaction model called the GameFlow Experience model that can be used to support the design of treasure hunt applications in tourism and education contexts. The GameFlow Model presents and clarifies various experiences; it provides such experiences in a real-life context, offers desirable design targets to be utilized in service design, and offers a perspective to consider when evaluating the success of adventure game concepts. User-centered game designs have adapted to human factor research in mainstream computing science. For many years, the user-centered design approach has been the most important research field in software development. Research has been focusing on user-centered design in software development such as office programs, but the same ideas and theories that will reflect the needs of a user-centered research are now also being applied to game design (Charles et al. 2005.) For several years, we have seen a growing interest in user experience design. Digital games are experience providers, and game developers need tools to better understand the user experience related to products and services they have created. This thesis aims to present what the user experience is in geocaching and treasure hunt games and how it can be used to develop new concepts for the treasure hunt. Engineers, designers, and researchers should have a clear understanding of what user experience is, what its parts are, and most importantly, how we can influence user satisfaction. In addition, we need to understand how users interact with electronic products and people, and how different elements synergize their experiences. This doctoral dissertation represents pioneering work on the user experience of geocaching and treasure hunt games in the context of tourism and education. The research also provides a model for game developers who are planning treasure hunt concepts.

University students’ regulation of learning and text processing – examples from medical and teacher education

The general aim of the thesis was to study university students’ learning from the perspective of regulation of learning and text processing. The data were collected from the two academic disciplines of medical and teacher education, which share the features of highly scheduled study, a multidisciplinary character, a complex relationship between theory and practice and a professional nature. Contemporary information society poses new challenges for learning, as it is not possible to learn all the information needed in a profession during a study programme. Therefore, it is increasingly important to learn how to think and learn independently, how to recognise gaps in and update one’s knowledge and how to deal with the huge amount of constantly changing information. In other words, it is critical to regulate one’s learning and to process text effectively. The thesis comprises five sub-studies that employed cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental designs and multiple methods, from surveys to eye tracking. Study I examined the connections between students’ study orientations and the ways they regulate their learning. In total, 410 second-, fourth- and sixth-year medical students from two Finnish medical schools participated in the study by completing a questionnaire measuring both general study orientations and regulation strategies. The students were generally deeply oriented towards their studies. However, they regulated their studying externally. Several interesting and theoretically reasonable connections between the variables were found. For instance, self-regulation was positively correlated with deep orientation and achievement orientation and was negatively correlated with non-commitment. However, external regulation was likewise positively correlated with deep orientation and achievement orientation but also with surface orientation and systematic orientation. It is argued that external regulation might function as an effective coping strategy in the cognitively loaded medical curriculum. Study II focused on medical students’ regulation of learning and their conceptions of the learning environment in an innovative medical course where traditional lectures were combined wth problem-based learning (PBL) group work. First-year medical and dental students (N = 153) completed a questionnaire assessing their regulation strategies of learning and views about the PBL group work. The results indicated that external regulation and self-regulation of the learning content were the most typical regulation strategies among the participants. In line with previous studies, self-regulation wasconnected with study success. Strictly organised PBL sessions were not considered as useful as lectures, although the students’ views of the teacher/tutor and the group were mainly positive. Therefore, developers of teaching methods are challenged to think of new solutions that facilitate reflection of one’s learning and that improve the development of self-regulation. In Study III, a person-centred approach to studying regulation strategies was employed, in contrast to the traditional variable-centred approach used in Study I and Study II. The aim of Study III was to identify different regulation strategy profiles among medical students (N = 162) across time and to examine to what extent these profiles predict study success in preclinical studies. Four regulation strategy profiles were identified, and connections with study success were found. Students with the lowest self-regulation and with an increasing lack of regulation performed worse than the other groups. As the person-centred approach enables us to individualise students with diverse regulation patterns, it could be used in supporting student learning and in facilitating the early diagnosis of learning difficulties. In Study IV, 91 student teachers participated in a pre-test/post-test design where they answered open-ended questions about a complex science concept both before and after reading either a traditional, expository science text or a refutational text that prompted the reader to change his/her beliefs according to scientific beliefs about the phenomenon. The student teachers completed a questionnaire concerning their regulation and processing strategies. The results showed that the students’ understanding improved after text reading intervention and that refutational text promoted understanding better than the traditional text. Additionally, regulation and processing strategies were found to be connected with understanding the science phenomenon. A weak trend showed that weaker learners would benefit more from the refutational text. It seems that learners with effective learning strategies are able to pick out the relevant content regardless of the text type, whereas weaker learners might benefit from refutational parts that contrast the most typical misconceptions with scientific views. The purpose of Study V was to use eye tracking to determine how third-year medical studets (n = 39) and internal medicine residents (n = 13) read and solve patient case texts. The results revealed differences between medical students and residents in processing patient case texts; compared to the students, the residents were more accurate in their diagnoses and processed the texts significantly faster and with a lower number of fixations. Different reading patterns were also found. The observed differences between medical students and residents in processing patient case texts could be used in medical education to model expert reasoning and to teach how a good medical text should be constructed. The main findings of the thesis indicate that even among very selected student populations, such as high-achieving medical students or student teachers, there seems to be a lot of variation in regulation strategies of learning and text processing. As these learning strategies are related to successful studying, students enter educational programmes with rather different chances of managing and achieving success. Further, the ways of engaging in learning seldom centre on a single strategy or approach; rather, students seem to combine several strategies to a certain degree. Sometimes, it can be a matter of perspective of which way of learning can be considered best; therefore, the reality of studying in higher education is often more complicated than the simplistic view of self-regulation as a good quality and external regulation as a harmful quality. The beginning of university studies may be stressful for many, as the gap between high school and university studies is huge and those strategies that were adequate during high school might not work as well in higher education. Therefore, it is important to map students’ learning strategies and to encourage them to engage in using high-quality learning strategies from the beginning. Instead of separate courses on learning skills, the integration of these skills into course contents should be considered. Furthermore, learning complex scientific phenomena could be facilitated by paying attention to high-quality learning materials and texts and other support from the learning environment also in the university. Eye tracking seems to have great potential in evaluating performance and growing diagnostic expertise in text processing, although more research using texts as stimulus is needed. Both medical and teacher education programmes and the professions themselves are challenging in terms of their multidisciplinary nature and increasing amounts of information and therefore require good lifelong learning skills during the study period and later in work life.

Crowdfunding as a new funding alternative for early stage start-ups

Attracting outside capital is a common problem for start-up companies. Capital markets define the funding options for companies and firms which suffer the most from these capital market imperfections are small start-up companies. Therefore it is important to study any new funding model which can offer a new solution to this inefficiency of capital markets. This study explains the traditional funding models for start-ups such as founders, friends & family, banks, business angels and venture capitalist. After giving background to traditional start-up funding this study delves into crowfunding (CF) and introduces it as a new funding method. The objective of the thesis is to answer one broad research question: Why and how should start-up companies use CF as an alternative funding method? To properly delve into this, this question has the following sub-questions: What kind of funding alternatives do start-up companies have? What are the pros and cons of CF compared to other funding options? How can start-ups benefit from CF? This study gives background on the rise of CF and the reasons why this new model is needed. Author will explain the different components of CF such as platforms, crowdfunders and projects. Also benefits and challenges of the crowdfunding model are investigated. As a new funding model CF has had to clear out many obstacles from its way. These are, for example, legal and regulatory issues as well education of crowd investors to understand this new investment option. . Start-up entrepreneurs can gain valuable insight from this study. The author has attempted to form best practices and guidelines of how to operate in the CF environment. This study was conducted by performing expert interviews, collecting data from previous studies and performing a content analysis of successful crowdfunding cases. Main findings from the study were that CF has huge potential in funding entrepreneurial projects. It is still a niche way for funding but growing rapidly. CF is earning its place among traditional funding options and has potential to fund projects which otherwise would struggle to find funding. With CF entrepreneur can tap into geographically diverse audience. It is a powerful validation tool for products and ideas and has the power to bring democratic elements to entrepreneurial funding.