Integrating a sustainable academic career around scholarly learning and teaching activities

To be scholarly in learning and teaching is rigorous academic work. It demands: currency and command of both discipline subject matter and educational theory; inquiring, methodical, and reflective approaches; the collection, evaluation and documentation of evidence of learning and teaching efficacy; and, optimally, entails participation in and communication among a community of teaching professionals. This chapter examines the author’s own practice in this regard to explicate the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of scholarly and scholarship approaches, as much as the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of that endeavour. In doing so, this meta‐analysis is made ‘community property’, in the same way that Shulman (1993: 6) exhorted we ‘change the status of teaching from private to community property’ so that teaching might be more greatly valued in the academy.

A model for enhancing assessment and teaching practice at the coalface : Insights from a Fellow-In-Residence engagement program

Australian universities are currently engaging with new governmental policies and regulations that require them to demonstrate enhanced quality and accountability in teaching and research. The development of national academic standards for learning outcomes in higher education is one such instance of this drive for excellence. These discipline-specific standards articulate the minimum, or Threshold Learning Outcomes, to be addressed by higher education institutions so that graduating students can demonstrate their achievement to their institutions, accreditation agencies, and industry recruiters. This impacts not only on the design of Engineering courses (with particular emphasis on pedagogy and assessment), but also on the preparation of academics to engage with these standards and implement them in their day-to-day teaching practice on a micro level. This imperative for enhanced quality and accountability in teaching is also significant at a meso level, for according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 25 per cent of teachers in Australian universities are aged 55 and above and more than 54 per cent are aged 45 and above (ABS, 2006). A number of institutions have undertaken recruitment drives to regenerate and enrich their academic workforce by appointing capacity-building research professors and increasing the numbers of early- and mid-career academics. This nationally driven agenda for quality and accountability in teaching permeates also the micro level of engineering education, since the demand for enhanced academic standards and learning outcomes requires both a strong advocacy for a shift to an authentic, collaborative, outcomes-focused education and the mechanisms to support academics in transforming their professional thinking and practice. Outcomes-focused education means giving greater attention to the ways in which the curriculum design, pedagogy, assessment approaches and teaching activities can most effectively make a positive, verifiable difference to students’ learning. Such education is authentic when it is couched firmly in the realities of learning environments, student and academic staff characteristics, and trustworthy educational research. That education will be richer and more efficient when staff works collaboratively, contributing their knowledge, experience and skills to achieve learning outcomes based on agreed objectives. We know that the school or departmental levels of universities are the most effective loci of changes in approaches to teaching and learning practices in higher education (Knight & Trowler, 2000). Heads of Schools are being increasingly entrusted with more responsibilities - in addition to setting strategic directions and managing the operational and sometimes financial aspects of their school, they are also expected to lead the development and delivery of the teaching, research and other academic activities. Guiding and mentoring individuals and groups of academics is one critical aspect of the Head of School’s role. Yet they do not always have the resources or support to help them mentor staff, especially the more junior academics. In summary, the international trend in undergraduate engineering course accreditation towards the demonstration of attainment of graduate attributes poses new challenges in addressing academic staff development needs and the assessment of learning. This paper will give some insights into the conceptual design, implementation and empirical effectiveness to date, of a Fellow-In-Residence Engagement (FIRE) program. The program is proposed as a model for achieving better engagement of academics with contemporary issues and effectively enhancing their teaching and assessment practices. It will also report on the program’s collaborative approach to working with Heads of Schools to better support academics, especially early-career ones, by utilizing formal and informal mentoring. Further, the paper will discuss possible factors that may assist the achievement of the intended outcomes of such a model, and will examine its contributions to engendering an outcomes-focussed thinking in engineering education.

Clinical teaching: Maintaining an educational role for doctors in the new health care environment

Context and objectives: Good clinical teaching is central to medical education but there is concern about maintaining this in contemporary, pressured health care environments. This paper aims to demonstrate that good clinical practice is at the heart of good clinical teaching. Methods: Seven roles are used as a framework for analysing good clinical teaching. The roles are medical expert, communicator, collaborator, manager, advocate, scholar and professional. Results: The analysis of clinical teaching and clinical practice demonstrates that they are closely linked. As experts, clinical teachers are involved in research, information retrieval and sharing of knowledge or teaching. Good communication with trainees, patients and colleagues defines teaching excellence. Clinicians can 'teach' collaboration by acting as role models and by encouraging learners to understand the responsibilities of other health professionals. As managers, clinicians can apply their skills to the effective management of learning resources. Similarly skills as advocates at the individual, community and population level can be passed on in educational encounters. The clinicians' responsibilities as scholars are most readily applied to teaching activities. Clinicians have clear roles in taking scholarly approaches to their practice and demonstrating them to others. Conclusion: Good clinical teaching is concerned with providing role models for good practice, making good practice visible and explaining it to trainees. This is the very basis of clinicians as professionals, the seventh role, and should be the foundation for the further development of clinicians as excellent clinical teachers.

The Relationship between Hospital Infection Surveillance and Control Activities and Antibiotic Resistant Pathogen Rates

Objective: The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship of surveillance and control activities in Canadian hospitals with rates of nosocomial methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), C. difficile associated diarrhea (CDAD), and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE). Methods: Surveys were sent to Infection Control programs in hospitals that participated in an earlier survey of infection control practices in Canadian acute care hospitals. Results: One hundred and twenty of 145 (82.8%) hospitals responded to the survey. The mean MRSA rate was 2.0 (SD 2.9) per 1,000 admissions, the mean CDAD rate was 3.8 (SD 4.3), and the mean VRE rate was 0.4 (SD 1.5). Multiple stepwise regression analysis found hospitals that reported infection rates by specific risk groups (r = - 0.27, p < 0.01) and that kept attendance records of infection control teaching activities (r = - 0.23, p < 0.01) were associated with lower MRSA rates. Multiple stepwise regression analysis found larger hospitals (r = 0.25, p < 0.01) and hospitals where infection control committees or staff had the direct authority to close a ward or unit to further admissions due to outbreaks (r = 0.22, p < 0.05) were associated with higher CDAD rates. Multiple logistic regression analysis found larger hospitals (OR = 1.6, CI 1.2 - 2.0, p = 0.003) and teaching hospitals (OR = 3.7, CI 1.2 - 11.8, p = 0.02) were associated with the presence of VRE. Hospitals were less likely to have VRE when infection control staff frequently contacted physicians and nurses for reports of new infections (OR = 0.5, CI 0.3 - 0.7, p = 0.02) and there were in-service programs for updating nursing and ancillary staff on current infection control practices (OR = 0.2, CI 0.1 - 0.7, p = 0.01). Conclusions: Surveillance and control activities were associated with MRSA and CDAD rates and the presence of VRE. Surveillance and control activities might be especially beneficial in large and teaching hospitals.

The Teaching Space Allocation Problem with splitting

A standard problem within universities is that of teaching space allocation which can be thought of as the assignment of rooms and times to various teaching activities. The focus is usually on courses that are expected to fit into one room. However, it can also happen that the course will need to be broken up, or ‘split’, into multiple sections. A lecture might be too large to fit into any one room. Another common example is that of seminars or tutorials. Although hundreds of students may be enrolled on a course, it is often subdivided into particular types and sizes of events dependent on the pedagogic requirements of that particular course. Typically, decisions as to how to split courses need to be made within the context of limited space requirements. Institutions do not have an unlimited number of teaching rooms, and need to effectively use those that they do have. The efficiency of space usage is usually measured by the overall ‘utilisation’ which is basically the fraction of the available seat-hours that are actually used. A multi-objective optimisation problem naturally arises; with a trade-off between satisfying preferences on splitting, a desire to increase utilisation, and also to satisfy other constraints such as those based on event location and timetabling conflicts. In this paper, we explore such trade-offs. The explorations themselves are based on a local search method that attempts to optimise the space utilisation by means of a ‘dynamic splitting’ strategy. The local moves are designed to improve utilisation and satisfy the other constraints, but are also allowed to split, and un-split, courses so as to simultaneously meet the splitting objectives.

Threshold effects in the Teaching Space Allocation Problem with Splitting

Universities aim for good “Space Management” so as to use the teaching space efficiently. Part of this task is to assign rooms and time-slots to teaching activities with limited numbers and capacities of lecture theaters, seminar rooms, etc. It is also common that some teaching activities require splitting into multiple events. For example, lectures can be too large to fit in one room or good teaching practice requires that seminars/tutorials are taught in small groups. Then, space management involves decisions on splitting as well as the assignments to rooms and time-slots. These decisions must be made whilst satisfying the pedagogic requirements of the institution and constraints on space resources. The efficiency of such management can be measured by the “utilisation”: the percentage of available seat-hours actually used. In many institutions, the observed utilisation is unacceptably low, and this provides our underlying motivation: to study the factors that affect teaching space utilisation, with the goal of improving it. We give a brief introduction to our work in this area, and then introduce a specific model for splitting. We present experimental results that show threshold phenomena and associated easy-hard-easy patterns of computational difficulty. We discuss why such behaviour is of importance for space management.

Sustained impact of a short small group course with systematic feedback in addition to regular clinical clerkship activities on musculoskeletal examination skills-a controlled study.

BACKGROUND The discrepancy between the extensive impact of musculoskeletal complaints and the common deficiencies in musculoskeletal examination skills lead to increased emphasis on structured teaching and assessment. However, studies of single interventions are scarce and little is known about the time-dependent effect of assisted learning in addition to a standard curriculum. We therefore evaluated the immediate and long-term impact of a small group course on musculoskeletal examination skills. METHODS All 48 Year 4 medical students of a 6 year curriculum, attending their 8 week clerkship of internal medicine at one University department in Berne, participated in this controlled study. Twenty-seven students were assigned to the intervention of a 6×1 h practical course (4-7 students, interactive hands-on examination of real patients; systematic, detailed feedback to each student by teacher, peers and patients). Twenty-one students took part in the regular clerkship activities only and served as controls. In all students clinical skills (CS, 9 items) were assessed in an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) station, including specific musculoskeletal examination skills (MSES, 7 items) and interpersonal skills (IPS, 2 items). Two raters assessed the skills on a 4-point Likert scale at the beginning (T0), the end (T1) and 4-12 months after (T2) the clerkship. Statistical analyses included Friedman test, Wilcoxon rank sum test and Mann-Whitney U test. RESULTS At T0 there were no significant differences between the intervention and control group. At T1 and T2 the control group showed no significant changes of CS, MSES and IPS compared to T0. In contrast, the intervention group significantly improved CS, MSES and IPS at T1 (p < 0.001). This enhancement was sustained for CS and MSES (p < 0.05), but not for IPS at T2. CONCLUSIONS Year 4 medical students were incapable of improving their musculoskeletal examination skills during regular clinical clerkship activities. However, an additional small group, interactive clinical skills course with feedback from various sources, improved these essential examination skills immediately after the teaching and several months later. We conclude that supplementary specific teaching activities are needed. Even a single, short-lasting targeted module can have a long lasting effect and is worth the additional effort.

E-blogspot in the teaching of strategic management

E-learning and e-learning applications/tools are available to all educators thanks to the evolution of technology and the internet. Although a great variety of technologies are available it is not always obvious how these can be integrated in traditional teaching to support and enhance the learning experience. The majority of the existing literature proposes the use of blogging as an activity that students should do in order to increase their active participation in learning. This article presents the use of blogspots in the teaching of Strategic Management as a tool used to create greater linkages between theory and practice, discussing the evolution of its utilisation in my modules, the current state of use and a series of reflections on experience gained from its use so far. Overall, I have found that there is limited literature on how blogging could link to teaching activities and its utilisation should be viewed as learning by doing which is evaluated and improved by critical reflection of the user.

ESL teacher profiles of ICT integration in their classroom practices and assessment activities : a portrait viewed through the lens of some Quebec teachers’ social representations

Abstract : Information and communication technologies (ICTs, henceforth) have become ubiquitous in our society. The plethora of devices competing with the computer, from iPads to the Interactive whiteboard, just to name a few, has provided teachers and students alike with the ability to communicate and access information with unprecedented accessibility and speed. It is only logical that schools reflect these changes given that their purpose is to prepare students for the future. Surprisingly enough, research indicates that ICT integration into teaching activities is still marginal. Many elementary and secondary schoolteachers are not making effective use of ICTs in their teaching activities as well as in their assessment practices. The purpose of the current study is a) to describe Quebec ESL teachers’ profiles of using ICTs in their daily teaching activities; b) to describe teachers’ ICT integration and assessment practices; and c) to describe teachers’ social representations regarding the utility and relevance of ICT use in their daily teaching activities and assessment practices. In order to attain our objectives, we based our theoretical framework, principally, on the social representations (SR, henceforth) theory and we defined most related constructs which were deemed fundamental to the current thesis. We also collected data from 28 ESL elementary and secondary school teachers working in public and private sectors. The interview guide used to that end included a range of items to elicit teachers’ SR in terms of ICT daily use in teaching activities as well as in assessment practices. In addition, we carried out our data analyses from a textual statistics perspective, a particular mode of content analysis, in order to extract the indicators underlying teachers’ representations of the teachers. The findings suggest that although almost all participants use a wide range of ICT tools in their practices, ICT implementation is seemingly not exploited to its fullest potential and, correspondingly, is likely to produce limited effects on students’ learning. Moreover, none of the interviewees claim that they use ICTs in their assessment practices and they still hold to the traditional paper-based assessment (PBA, henceforth) approach of assessing students’ learning. Teachers’ common discourse reveals a gap between the positive standpoint with regards to ICT integration, on the one hand, and the actual uses of instructional technology, on the other. These results are useful for better understanding the way ESL teachers in Quebec currently view their use of ICTs, particularly for evaluation purposes. In fact, they provide a starting place for reconsidering the implementation of ICTs in elementary and secondary schools. They may also be useful to open up avenues for the development of a future research program in this regard.

Formative and summative assessment and the notion of constructive alignment

This paper discusses the different perceptions of first year accounting students about their tutorial activities and their engagements in assessment. As the literature suggests, unless participation in learning activities forms part of graded assessment, it is often difficult to engage students in these activities. Using an action research model, this paper reports the study of first year accounting students' responses to action-oriented learning tasks in tutorials. The paper focuses on the importance of aligning curriculum objectives, learning and teaching activities and assessment, i.e. the notion of constructive alignment. However, as the research findings indicate, without support at institutional level, applying constructive alignment to facilitate quality student learning outcomes is a difficult task. Thus, the impacts of policy constraints on curriculum issues are also discussed, focusing on the limitations faced by tutors and their lack of involvement in curriculum development.

Formative and Summative Assessment and the Notion of Constructive Allignment

This paper discusses perceptions of first year accounting students about their tutorial activities and their engagements in assessment. As the literature suggests, unless participation in learning activities forms part of graded assessment it is often difficult to engage students in these activities. Using an action research model, this paper reports the study of first year accounting students' responses to action-orientated learning tasks in tutorials. The paper focuses on the importance of aligning curriculum objectives, learning and teaching activities and assessment,i.e. the notion of constructive alignment. However, as the research findings indicate, without support at institutional level, applying constructive alignment to facilitate quality student learning outcomes is a difficult task. Thus, the impacts of policy constraints on curriculum issues are also discussed, focusing on the limitations faced by tutors and their lack of involvement in curriculum development.

Academic strategy planning for a university research centre

The Signal Processing Research Centre (SPRC) at QUT recently formulated an academic strategy plan. This paper describes the various factors that must be considered in undertaking such a planning process. It also illustrates the need for a university research centre to plan for its teaching activities as well as its research activities. Complementary teaching and research are essential to the achievement of the strategic objectives of a university centre.

Questioning pedagogies : Hong Kong pre-service teachers' dialogic reflections on a transnational school experience

There are increasing opportunities in many countries for pre-service teachers to engage in a transnational school-based experience as part of study abroad programmes. The transformative potential of such transnational teaching experiences is recorded in research studies, often supported by data from participant surveys. However, there has been a lack of evidence investigating how shifts in professional understanding derive from such experiences. This qualitative study addresses this issue by exploring the perspectives of 16 pre-service teachers of English as a Second language from Hong Kong, who engaged in transnational teaching activities with primary school pupils in Australia, during their study abroad program. Discourse analysis of participants’ dialogues traces how they encountered conflicting Discourses of ‘student-centredness’ in the Australian classroom. Reflecting dialogically on their experiences led participants to negotiate and reframe their understandings of language teaching pedagogy and themselves as language teachers. The findings demonstrate the importance of both peer and lecturer feedback into the process of dialogic reflection and the need for more longitudinal research into the impact of transnational school-based experience in pre-service teacher education.

Principals, Teachers, and Student's Perception of the Information and Communication Technology in Kuwait Secondary Schools (Rhetoric and reality)

ICT integration has been advocated to provide opportunities to improve students’ achievement and engagement through transforming the educational setting. A valuable tool that contributes in enhancing and developing students’ cognitive skills for lifelong learning, ICT integration has introduced a new educational philosophy, shifting the role of students into a more central position in the pedagogical processes. Kuwait, as with many other countries, has recently planned ICT integration to develop its citizen’s capacities. This study sought to capture the principals’, teachers’, and students’ perceptions of ICT integration in pedagogical activities, as well as how ICT is being used for learning and teaching activities in three ICT leading Kuwaiti secondary schools. Interviews with principals, teachers, and students were conducted, along with an open-ended questionnaire for the teachers, researcher observations, and document analysis. The findings revealed that ICT integration in Kuwait needed to be reinforced to accomplish the ICT integration objectives. A call for further support for teachers, and a reconsideration of the ICT integration strategies were also recommended.