Development of an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) to assess formulation and extemporaneous dispensing skills in MPharm undergraduates

Background: The use of Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in Pharmacy has been explored; however this is the first attempt in Queen’s University School of Pharmacy, Belfast to assess students via this method in a module where chemistry is the main discipline.

Aims: To devise an OSCE to assess undergraduate ability to check extemporaneously dispensed products for clinical and formulation errors. This activity also aims to consider whether it is a viable method of assessment in such a science-based class, from a staff and student perspective.

Method: Students rotated around a number of stations, performing a check of the product, corresponding prescription and formulation record sheet detailing the theory behind the formulation. They were assessed on their ability to spot intentional mistakes at each one.

Results: Of the 79 students questioned, 95% indicated that OSCE made them aware of the importance of the clinical check carried out by the pharmacist. Nearly all of the undergraduates (72 out of 79) felt that OSCE made them aware of the type of mistakes that students make in class. Most (5 out of 7) of the academic team members strongly agreed that it made students aware of ‘point of dispensing’ checks carried out by pharmacists, in addition to helping them to prepare for their exam.

Conclusion: OSCE assesses both scientific and formulation skills, and has increased the diversity of assessment of this module, bringing with it many additional benefits for the undergraduates since it measures their ability to exercise professional judgement in a time- constrained environment and, in this way, mirrors the conditions many pharmacists work within.

“I miss being spoon-fed”. A comparison of transition from school to university education from the perspective of undergraduate pharmacy students

Background: The transition from school to university can be challenging and there is increasing concern among academics that students are inadequately prepared for entry to university courses.Aims: To investigate students’ views on transition from school to university education.Method: A focus group was conducted with first-year students and analysed using thematic analysis. Students were invited to participate in an electronic questionnaire; responses were analysed via SPSS for Windows. The Mann– Whitney U test was utilised with p<0.05 set as significant.Results: A response rate of 60% (88/147) was obtained for the questionnaire. Differences included staff-student interactions, learning methods, examination preparation and feedback provision. Many (85%) agreed that the main emphasis in school was on examination preparation; 29.6% considered this to be the case at university (z=-8.315; p<0.05). Most students (95.4%) considered the feedback they received at school helped improve performance; this decreased to 50% when asked about feedback at university (z=-8.326; p<0.05).Conclusion: Students appear to be insufficiently prepared for the demands of higher education. They desire various aspects of their university educational experience to be more akin to that of school, including: a greater level of individual attention, increased access to teaching staff, and further clarification and transparency about the standard required to pass exams. Further work can now be done by academic staff to aid the transition and improve the learning experience.

The changing university business model: a stakeholder perspective

Universities are in a current state of transition, whereby they are expected to develop a wide range of relationships with stakeholders in order to enhance regional innovation systems. However, despite external environmental pressures commonly regarded as one of the main drivers of business model evolution, there is a lack of studies that explore business model innovation as a result of multiple stakeholder influences. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to examine the changing university business model within a region of the United Kingdom, using a stakeholder perspective that will aid theoretical development and refinement in both the business model and stakeholder fields. This examination is aided by consideration of the university business model as an activity system. Repeat interviews, combined with stakeholder theory, have been used to show how the changing university business model–stakeholder relationship has progressed through different stakeholder stages with resultant changes in content, structure and governance. Furthermore, conflicting objectives between each of the stakeholder groups (i.e. academics, industry liaison staff, technology transfer office staff and government support agency representatives) have led to the university business model evolving not as a process of co-creation but rather in a series of transitions whereby multiple stakeholders are continually shaping the university business model through strategies that are dependent upon their salience. Finally, this paper contributes to the development and refinement of business model innovation research, in that the use of stakeholder constructs can illustrate the impact of multiple stakeholders' power and influence on business model innovation.

Dialogicality in university classroom talk

University classroom talk is a collaborative struggle to make meaning. Taking the perspectival nature of interaction as central, this paper presents an investigation of the genre of spoken academic discourse and in particular the types of activities which are orientated to the goal of collaborative ideas or tasks, such as seminars, tutorials, workshops. The purpose of the investigation was to identify examples of dialogicality through an examination of stance-taking. The data used in this study is a spoken corpus of academic English created from recordings of a range of subject discipline classrooms at a UK university. A frequency-based approach to recurrent word sequences (lexical bundles) was used to identify signals of epistemic and attitudinal stance and to initiate an exploration of the features of elaboration. Findings of quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal some similarities and differences between this study and those of US based classroom contexts in relation to the use and frequency of lexical bundles. Findings also highlight the process that elaboration plays in grounding perspectives and negotiating alignment of interactants. Elaboration seems to afford the space for the enactment of student stance in relation to the tutor embodiment of discipline knowledge.

Nutritional Status of older patients attending Cork University Dental School and Hospital

Objectives: This study aimed to gather data on the nutritional status of older patients attending Cork University Dental School and Hospital for treatment in the Restorative Department. Information was also collected about the medical status of the patients including the prevalence of self-reported xerostomia.
Methods: Data was collected by a self-completion questionnaire followed by a brief clinical examination. Nutritional Status was measured using the short version of the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) which recorded patients’ Body Mass Index (BMI). The MNA consists of 6 parameters (including questions relating to patients’ history and anthropometric data) with a maximum total of 14 points. Scores of 12-14 indicate “normal nutritional status” whilst those between 8 and 11 indicate a patient “at risk of malnutrition”. Scores lower than 8 are an indication a patient who is “malnourished”. All patients attending Cork University Dental School and Hospital aged 65 years and older were invited to participate in the study.

Results: A total of 22 subjects participated in this study. Twelve patients were partially dentate with 10 edentulous. The results from the MNA indicate that 11 patients were of “normal nutritional status” with 11 patients identified as being “at risk of malnutrition”. None of the subjects were “malnourished”. Edentate patients generally recorded lower MNA scores than partially dentate patients. In total, 9 patients reported experiencing xerostomia with 8 indicating that they needed to sip liquids to aid swallowing but only 3 had difficulty swallowing food.

Conclusion: This small study indicates that a number of the older patients attending Cork University Dental School and Hospital for dental care may be “at risk of malnutrition”. These findings suggest that nutritional advice and dental care should both be included in an overall package of care for older patients.

A Hybrid Swarm Based Approach in Addressing University Timetabling Problems

This paper is concerned with the application of an automated hybrid approach in addressing the university timetabling problem. The approach described is based on the nature-inspired artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. An ABC algorithm is a biologically-inspired optimization approach, which has been widely implemented in solving a range of optimization problems in recent years such as job shop scheduling and machine timetabling problems. Although the approach has proven to be robust across a range of problems, it is acknowledged within the literature that there currently exist a number of inefficiencies regarding the exploration and exploitation abilities. These inefficiencies can often lead to a slow convergence speed within the search process. Hence, this paper introduces a variant of the algorithm which utilizes a global best model inspired from particle swarm optimization to enhance the global exploration ability while hybridizing with the great deluge (GD) algorithm in order to improve the local exploitation ability. Using this approach, an effective balance between exploration and exploitation is attained. In addition, a traditional local search approach is incorporated within the GD algorithm with the aim of further enhancing the performance of the overall hybrid method. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, two diverse university timetabling datasets are investigated, i.e., Carter's examination timetabling and Socha course timetabling datasets. It should be noted that both problems have differing complexity and different solution landscapes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of producing high quality solutions across both these benchmark problems, showing a good degree of generality in the approach. Moreover, the proposed method produces best results on some instances as compared with other approaches presented in the literature.

A Hybrid Imperialist Approach in Solving University Timetabling Problems. Information Sciences. Vol. 283, 1-21

Generating timetables for an institution is a challenging and time consuming task due to different demands on the overall structure of the timetable. In this paper, a new hybrid method which is a combination of a great deluge and artificial bee colony algorithm (INMGD-ABC) is proposed to address the university timetabling problem. Artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) is a population based method that has been introduced in recent years and has proven successful in solving various optimization problems effectively. However, as with many search based approaches, there exist weaknesses in the exploration and exploitation abilities which tend to induce slow convergence of the overall search process. Therefore, hybridization is proposed to compensate for the identified weaknesses of the ABC. Also, inspired from imperialist competitive algorithms, an assimilation policy is implemented in order to improve the global exploration ability of the ABC algorithm. In addition, Nelder–Mead simplex search method is incorporated within the great deluge algorithm (NMGD) with the aim of enhancing the exploitation ability of the hybrid method in fine-tuning the problem search region. The proposed method is tested on two differing benchmark datasets i.e. examination and course timetabling datasets. A statistical analysis t-test has been conducted and shows the performance of the proposed approach as significantly better than basic ABC algorithm. Finally, the experimental results are compared against state-of-the art methods in the literature, with results obtained that are competitive and in certain cases achieving some of the current best results to those in the literature.

ILS and RTP: Support to Researchers Provided by Information and Learning Services as Part of the Research Training Programme at the University of Worcester, Past, Present and Future.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the involvement of Information and Learning Services staff in the delivery of the Research Training Programme at the University of Worcester, UK with a focus on researcher receptivity. I believe that by constantly reflecting on the development of that part of the programme delivered by ILS and by examining feedback from the sessions, it is possible to improve and increase the level of researcher receptivity. It is hoped that such examination and reflection will be of value and relevance to the IL community since by reflecting on success and failure in a local context and by mapping this reflection to existing research enables librarians to improve the support provided to researchers within their institutions. This article outlines the support given to research students at the University of Worcester in the past, examines the changes leading to present programme delivery and reflects on considerations for future support. The article is underpinned by reference to current research undertaken in international (albeit Western-centric) contexts. I note that the rationale behind changes is embedded in current adult learning and teaching theory. In an increasingly competitive research environment where funding is dependent on a statistically monitored research output, the aim of such support is to integrate any IL contribution into the wider research training programme. Thus resource discovery becomes part of the reflexive research cycle. Implicit in this investigative reflection is the desire of the IL community to constantly strive towards the positive reception of IL into research support programmes which are perceived by researchers as highly valuable to the process and progress of their work.

The Advancing MOOCs for Development Initiative: An examination of MOOC usage for professional workforce development outcomes in Colombia, the Philippines, & South Africa

The potential of online learning has long afforded the hope of providing quality education to anyone, anywhere in the world. The recent development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) heralded an exciting new breakthrough by providing free academic instruction and professional skills development from the world’s leading universities to anyone with the sufficient resources to access the internet. The research in Advancing MOOCs for Development Initiative study was designed to analyze the MOOC landscape in developing countries and to better understand the motivations of MOOC users and afford insights on the advantages and limitations of MOOCs for workforce development outcomes. The key findings of this study challenge commonly held beliefs about MOOC usage in developing countries, defying typical characterizations of how people in resource constrained settings use technology for learning and employment. In fact, some of the findings are so contrary to what has been reported in the U.S. and other developed environments that they raise new questions for further investigation.

Examination timetabling automation using hybrid meta-heuristics

Trabalho de projeto realizado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores

Brock University Tower

The original Master Plan of 1964 called for the campus to stretch out 1 1/4 miles across the escarpment with arts buildings west of the tower and science buildings to the east. This plan laid out the development of Brock for the next 10 or 11 years by which time enrollment was expected to be near 8000 students. Pictured here is the tower and main entrance to the university. To the left is a planned administration building. The original plans also called for a miniature canal running between the boulevard at the entrance which would then pass through an underground system and open up into a waterfall at the brink of the escarpment behind the tower.

Welch Hall South Entrance

The main entrance to Welch Hall and the David S. Howes Theatre, formerly the Playhouse. The Schmon Tower can be seen in the background. Note the sign reading 'St. Catharines Teachers College. This photograph thus precedes the amalgamation of the College with Brock University.

Welch Hall South Entrance

The main entrance to Welch Hall and the David S. Howes Theatre, formerly the Playhouse. The Schmon Tower can be seen in the background. The 'St. Catharines Teachers College' sign is no longer present. This photograph was taken at some point after the College joined Brock University.