Strategic Emergency department design: An approach to capacity planning in healthcare provision in overcrowded emergency rooms

Healthcare professionals and the public have increasing concerns about the ability of emergency departments to meet current demands. Increased demand for emergency services, mainly caused by a growing number of minor and moderate injuries has reached crisis proportions, especially in the United Kingdom. Numerous efforts have been made to explore the complex causes because it is becoming more and more important to provide adequate healthcare within tight budgets. Optimisation of patient pathways in the emergency department is therefore an important factor. This paper explores the possibilities offered by dynamic simulation tools to improve patient pathways using the emergency department of a busy university teaching hospital in Switzerland as an example.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Dental Information Technology Course

Purpose: To develop an interdisciplinary course to teach dental students about evidence-based dentistry, development of search strategies, critical appraisal of literature, and dental informatics. [See PDF for complete abstract]

An Innovative Approach to Impacting Student Academic Achievement and Attitudes: Pilot Study of the HEADS UP Virtual Molecular Biology Lab

Introduction: The Virtual Molecular Biology Lab is an innovative, computer-based educational program designed to teach advanced high school biology students how to create a transgenic mouse model in a simulated laboratory setting. It was created in an effort to combat the current decrease in adolescent enthusiasm for and academic achievement in science and science careers, especially in Hispanic students. Because studies have found that hands-on learning, particularly computer-based instruction, is effective in enhancing science achievement, the Virtual Lab is a potential tool for increasing the number of Hispanic students that choose to enter science fields. [See PDF for complete abstract]

Family diversity in social exclusion situations. Results and reflections on research, teaching and knowledge transfer activities

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the configurations of the families that live in contexts of social exclusion; provide conceptualizations of their operation mode; highlight the formative effects that neighborhood interdisciplinary practices with such families produce in the just graduated psychologists, included on the Extension Program. We wish to contribute to produce systematic knowledge that can account for such family configurations as potential receiver of integration policies. We are also interested on transferring the approach to diversity in the training of young professionals, in order not to be regarded as a deviation from ideal models, but as an expression of different strategies built by members of a community, to resolve children breeding and to bear their existences. This work is the result about reflections on productions inside a research fellowship: The complexities that takes the breeding in families who lives in a social exclusion situation; researches about breeding, carried out from signature Developmental Psychology II, and from de interdisciplinary work with psychologically assisted families in twelve suburbs of the city of La Plata (University Extension Program "Free Legal Offices" (Convention between Law and Social Sciences and Psychology Faculties, U.N.L.P.). From a qualitative methodology and an interdisciplinary participation, the results have arrive at the characterization and proposed conceptualizations of the included families and at the same time determine the benefits that brings with the work that articulates research and extension activities for the training of advanced students and young graduates.

CLIL : The approach for the future?

The aim of this article is to explore the potential of CLIL as a key approach in the future of English language teaching. Issues related to the different roles of teachers -including teacher training- and to the school specific subjects have been discussed . We have also focused our attention on the relationship between this approach and culture. The role of language in CLIL and the implementation of different modes of assessment are also mentioned. Material selection and adaptation is analysed in the light of CLIL ? principles. The analysis of these points leads us to provide a series of requisites which are to be met if we want the CLIL approach to improve out teaching practices and our students learning experiences

Family diversity in social exclusion situations. Results and reflections on research, teaching and knowledge transfer activities

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the configurations of the families that live in contexts of social exclusion; provide conceptualizations of their operation mode; highlight the formative effects that neighborhood interdisciplinary practices with such families produce in the just graduated psychologists, included on the Extension Program. We wish to contribute to produce systematic knowledge that can account for such family configurations as potential receiver of integration policies. We are also interested on transferring the approach to diversity in the training of young professionals, in order not to be regarded as a deviation from ideal models, but as an expression of different strategies built by members of a community, to resolve children breeding and to bear their existences. This work is the result about reflections on productions inside a research fellowship: The complexities that takes the breeding in families who lives in a social exclusion situation; researches about breeding, carried out from signature Developmental Psychology II, and from de interdisciplinary work with psychologically assisted families in twelve suburbs of the city of La Plata (University Extension Program "Free Legal Offices" (Convention between Law and Social Sciences and Psychology Faculties, U.N.L.P.). From a qualitative methodology and an interdisciplinary participation, the results have arrive at the characterization and proposed conceptualizations of the included families and at the same time determine the benefits that brings with the work that articulates research and extension activities for the training of advanced students and young graduates.

CLIL : The approach for the future?

The aim of this article is to explore the potential of CLIL as a key approach in the future of English language teaching. Issues related to the different roles of teachers -including teacher training- and to the school specific subjects have been discussed . We have also focused our attention on the relationship between this approach and culture. The role of language in CLIL and the implementation of different modes of assessment are also mentioned. Material selection and adaptation is analysed in the light of CLIL ? principles. The analysis of these points leads us to provide a series of requisites which are to be met if we want the CLIL approach to improve out teaching practices and our students learning experiences

CLIL : The approach for the future?

The aim of this article is to explore the potential of CLIL as a key approach in the future of English language teaching. Issues related to the different roles of teachers -including teacher training- and to the school specific subjects have been discussed . We have also focused our attention on the relationship between this approach and culture. The role of language in CLIL and the implementation of different modes of assessment are also mentioned. Material selection and adaptation is analysed in the light of CLIL ? principles. The analysis of these points leads us to provide a series of requisites which are to be met if we want the CLIL approach to improve out teaching practices and our students learning experiences

Family diversity in social exclusion situations. Results and reflections on research, teaching and knowledge transfer activities

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the configurations of the families that live in contexts of social exclusion; provide conceptualizations of their operation mode; highlight the formative effects that neighborhood interdisciplinary practices with such families produce in the just graduated psychologists, included on the Extension Program. We wish to contribute to produce systematic knowledge that can account for such family configurations as potential receiver of integration policies. We are also interested on transferring the approach to diversity in the training of young professionals, in order not to be regarded as a deviation from ideal models, but as an expression of different strategies built by members of a community, to resolve children breeding and to bear their existences. This work is the result about reflections on productions inside a research fellowship: The complexities that takes the breeding in families who lives in a social exclusion situation; researches about breeding, carried out from signature Developmental Psychology II, and from de interdisciplinary work with psychologically assisted families in twelve suburbs of the city of La Plata (University Extension Program "Free Legal Offices" (Convention between Law and Social Sciences and Psychology Faculties, U.N.L.P.). From a qualitative methodology and an interdisciplinary participation, the results have arrive at the characterization and proposed conceptualizations of the included families and at the same time determine the benefits that brings with the work that articulates research and extension activities for the training of advanced students and young graduates.

A new way of teaching different subjects in a foreign language in the Building Engineering Degree at the Universidad Politécnica.

The European Union has been promoting linguistic diversity for many years as one of its main educational goals. This is an element that facilitates student mobility and student exchanges between different universities and countries and enriches the education of young undergraduates. In particular, a higher degree of competence in the English language is becoming essential for engineers, architects and researchers in general, as English has become the lingua franca that opens up horizons to internationalisation and the transfer of knowledge in today’s world. Many experts point to the Integrated Approach to Contents and Foreign Languages System as being an option that has certain benefits over the traditional method of teaching a second language that is exclusively based on specific subjects. This system advocates teaching the different subjects in the syllabus in a language other than one’s mother tongue, without prioritising knowledge of the language over the subject. This was the idea that in the 2009/10 academic year gave rise to the Second Language Integration Programme (SLI Programme) at the Escuela Arquitectura Técnica in the Universidad Politécnica Madrid (EUATM-UPM), just at the beginning of the tuition of the new Building Engineering Degree, which had been adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) model. This programme is an interdisciplinary initiative for the set of subjects taught during the semester and is coordinated through the Assistant Director Office for Educational Innovation. The SLI Programme has a dual goal; to familiarise students with the specific English terminology of the subject being taught, and at the same time improve their communication skills in English. A total of thirty lecturers are taking part in the teaching of eleven first year subjects and twelve in the second year, with around 120 students who have voluntarily enrolled in a special group in each semester. During the 2010/2011 academic year the degree of acceptance and the results of the SLI Programme have been monitored. Tools have been designed to aid interdisciplinary coordination and to analyse satisfaction, such as coordination records and surveys. The results currently available refer to the first and second year and are divided into specific aspects of the different subjects involved and into general aspects of the ongoing experience.

The introduction of teaching innovations into the traditional teaching of construction and building materials

The traditional teaching methods used for training civil engineers are currently being called into question as a result of the new knowledge and skills now required by the labor market. In addition, the European Higher Education Area is requesting that students be given a greater say in their learning. In the subject called Construction and Building Materials at the Civil Engineering School of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, a path was set three academic years ago to lead to an improvement in traditional teaching by introducing active methodologies. The innovations are based on cooperative learning, new technologies, and continuous assessment. The writers’ proposal is to offer their experience as a contribution to the debate on how students can be encouraged to acquire the skills currently demanded from a civil engineer, though not overlooking solid, top-quality training. From the outcomes obtained, it can be concluded that using new teaching techniques to supplement a traditional approach provides more opportunities for students to learn while boosting their motivation. In our case, the introduction of these changes has resulted in an increased pass rate of 29% on average, when such a figure is considered in the light of the mean value of passes during the last decade.

How Blended Learning Reduce Underachievement in Higher Education: An Experience in Teaching Computer Sciences.

This paper presents a blended learning approach and a study evaluating instruction in a software engineering-related course unit as part of an undergraduate engineering degree program in computing. In the past, the course unit had a lecture-based format. In view of student underachievement and the high course unit dropout rate, a distance-learning system was deployed, where students were allowed to choose between a distance-learning approach driven by a moderate constructivist instructional model or a blended-learning approach. The results of this experience are presented, with the aim of showing the effectiveness of the teaching/learning system deployed compared to the lecture-based system previously in place. The grades earned by students under the new system, following the distance-learning and blended-learning courses, are compared statistically to the grades attained in earlier years in the traditional face-to-face classroom (lecture-based) learning.

Metaphor and Genre: An Approach to improve the learning process of English for Aeronautics

This study suggests a theoretical framework for improving the teaching/ learning process of English employed in the Aeronautical discourse that brings together cognitive learning strategies, Genre Analysis and the Contemporary theory of Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). It maintains that cognitive strategies such as imagery, deduction, inference and grouping can be enhanced by means of metaphor and genre awareness in the context of content based approach to language learning. A list of image metaphors and conceptual metaphors which comes from the terminological database METACITEC is provided. The metaphorical terms from the area of Aeronautics have been taken from specialised dictionaries and have been categorised according to the conceptual metaphors they respond to, by establishing the source domains and the target domains, as well as the semantic networks found. This information makes reference to the internal mappings underlying the discourse of aeronautics reflected in five aviation accident case studies which are related to accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and provides an important source for designing language teaching tasks. La Lingüística Cognitiva y el Análisis del Género han contribuido a la mejora de la enseñanza de segundas lenguas y, en particular, al desarrollo de la competencia lingüística de los alumnos de inglés para fines específicos. Este trabajo pretende perfeccionar los procesos de enseñanza y el aprendizaje del lenguaje empleado en el discurso aeronáutico por medio de la práctica de estrategias cognitivas y prestando atención a la Teoría del análisis del género y a la Teoría contemporánea de la metáfora (Lakoff y Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). Con el propósito de crear recursos didácticos en los que se apliquen estrategias metafóricas, se ha elaborado un listado de metáforas de imagen y de metáforas conceptuales proveniente de la base de datos terminológica META-CITEC. Estos términos se han clasificado de acuerdo con las metáforas conceptuales y de imagen existentes en esta área de conocimiento. Para la enseñanza de este lenguaje de especialidad, se proponen las correspondencias y las proyecciones entre el dominio origen y el dominio meta que se han hallado en los informes de accidentes aéreos tomados de la Junta federal de la Seguridad en el Transporte (NTSB)

Teaching Planning of Forestry Engineering in Spain : origins and evolution

This paper addresses the historical evolution of, from its inception, to the present day, within the changing context of EHEA and linked to professional competences. The research methodology, although it is mainly a historical document review, expert opinions on university educational planning of university education of forestry engineering in Spain are also included. The results show the evolution of centralized planning, based on technical knowledge transmission to an approach based on competences (technical, contextual and behavioral) focusing on learning for improving employability.

Virtual science hub: an open source platform to enrich science teaching

This paper presents the Virtual Science Hub platform. It is an open source platform that combines a social network, an e-learning authoring tool, a videoconference service and a learning object repository for science teaching enrichment. These four main functionalities fit very well together. The platform was released in April 2012 and since then it has not stopped growing. Finally we present the results of the surveys conducted and the statistics gathered to validate this approach.