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Innovative blended learning approach: constructive alignment in an enhanced induction programme for international theatre nurses
No full textThe globalisation of the healthcare workforce necessitates effective strategies to facilitate the transition of international healthcare professionals into their new practice environments (Kawi and Xu, 2009). The induction of international theatre nurses into the UK healthcare system is one such context, where current literature indicates a gap in structured, focused, and comprehensive induction programmes (Bond, Merriman, & Walthall, 2020). This research presents an innovative project between a university and a hospital in the UK aimed at enhancing induction programmes, featuring international relevance due to the universal need for effective international workforce integration strategies (Royal College of Nursing, 2021).
The methodology deployed in this project encompassed a blended learning approach (Garrison and Kanuka, 2004). Qualitative data were gathered via the assessment methods and course evaluation feedback from all stakeholders i.e., trainees and colleagues (Biggs, 2003).
Key findings from this project revealed significant improvements in nurses' confidence and competence post-induction, suggesting the effectiveness of the enhanced programme (Maben et al., 2006). Additionally, qualitative insights highlighted the value of a structured, supportive, and contextually relevant induction experience. These findings have implications not just for theatre nurses, but for the wider international healthcare professional cohort as the teaching sessions are designed on the general principles of constructive alignment and preceptorship (Biggs, 1996; Irwin, Bliss, & Poole,2018).
Conference delegates will learn from the innovative approach taken in this project, including the collaborative university-hospital partnership, blended learning approach, development and implementation of the enhanced induction programme, and the implications of the findings for the broader healthcare sector (Health Education England, 2017). This project offers practical insights for healthcare educators, managers, and policymakers interested in optimising induction programmes for international healthcare professionals (Royal College of Nursing, 2021).
The topic holds high relevance for the perioperative nursing, especially in the face of increasing internationalisation of theatre nurses and the needs of teamworking in terms of effective perioperative multidisciplinary team communication. Enhancing induction programmes for international theatre nurses can significantly improve patient care by ensuring that these professionals are adequately equipped for their roles (NMC, 2018). Furthermore, the research-informed teaching methods involved in this project support the notion that improved induction processes can aid in addressing the challenges of staff retention, workplace culture and integration - issues that are fundamental to the stability and sustainability of the global healthcare workforce (Health Education England, 2019)
Apartheid in the digital outdoors? Representations of diversity in the Instagram content of outdoor brands from the US, UK and Scandinavia
No full textThe outdoors offers widely understood health and wellbeing benefits and provides an unparalleled resource for the realisation and projection of identity, from the personal to the national. Yet participation in the outdoors in the countries of the global north is manifestly unequal, with BIPOC* communities typically much less likely than white counterparts to have access either to urban greenspaces or engage in outdoor leisure activities such as hiking, trailrunning, cycling, climbing, sailing, etc. Previous research on this topic invariably finds that promotional media construe the outdoors as a predominantly ‘white’ space in the social imagination (Finney 2014, Mills 2014) and reproduce an outdoor leisure identity that is ‘necessarily White, able-bodied, straight, and male’ (Stanley 2020, cf. McNeil et al. 2012, Godtman Kling et al 2020). In light of the developments wrought by both BLM and the coronavirus pandemic, this research project revisits the hypothesis that outdoor media perpetuates what Martin (2004) terms ‘apartheid in the outdoors’ by performing a content analysis of the Instagram posts of the top 10 outdoor brands in the US, Scandinavia and UK between the spring and summer seasons of 2020. The analysis reveals a marked difference in representations of diversity – in all its forms - across the three regions over the period, the significance of which is discussed in the context of demographic, political and cultural differences among the regions alongside the rise of ‘brand activism’ and debates around ‘woke washing’ (Sobande 2019, Vredenberg et al 2020)
An electrokinetic‑biocementation study for clay stabilisation using carbonic anhydrase‑producing bacteria
Get PDFThis study investigates the feasibility of biocementing clay soil underneath a railway embankment of the UK rail network via carbonic anhydrase (CA) biocementation, implementing the treatments electrokinetically. Compared to previous biocementation studies using the ureolytic route, the CA pathway is attractive as CA-producing bacteria can sequester CO2 to produce biocement. Clay soil samples were treated electrokinetically using biostimulation and bioaugmentation conditions to induce biocementation. The efects of the treatment were assessed in terms of undrained shear strength using the cone penetration test, moisture content, and calcium carbonate content measurements. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analyses were also conducted on soil samples before and after treatment to evaluate the reaction products. The results showed that upon biostimulation, the undrained shear strength of the soil increased uniformly throughout the soil, from 17.6 kPa (in the natural untreated state) to 106.6 kPa. SEM micrographs also showed a clear change in the soil structure upon biostimulation. Unlike biostimulation, bioaugmentation did not have the same performance, although a high amount of CaCO3 precipitates was detected, and bacteria were observed to have entered the soil. The prospects are exciting, as it was shown that it is possible to achieve a considerable strength increase by the biostimulation of native bacteria capturing CO2 while improving the soil strength, thus having the potential to contribute both to the resilience of existing railway infrastructure and to climate change mitigation
Men making meaning after loss: a thematic analysis of men’s meaning making after the death of someone they love
Get PDFThe death of a loved one is a significant life event which can have devastating consequences for the bereaved, as the meaningful structures of their lives may be shattered and destroyed. The reconstruction of meaning can be helpful for those bereaved individuals who search for new meaning after the loss of a loved one as they incorporate their loss into their lives. Reviewing previous studies on meaning making after loss highlights that the majority of participants in these studies were women, with men’s voices not being robustly included. Any gender difference is therefore not demonstrated. Assuming that men and women make meaning in the same way potentially dismisses the gendered experience of men, and may leave them feeling increasingly alienated and isolated at an already difficult and isolating time. This is significant: although the numbers of men who are referred for psychological therapy are increasing, they remain low. This research aims to include male voices in the body of research about meaning making after loss. Eight male participants were interviewed about their meaning making after the death of a loved one, using semi-structured interviews. A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted to analyse what helped and what hindered this process, as well as the themes of meanings made. Three overarching themes were identified from the data: 1. Inexorable death; 2. Identity shift; 3. Meaning in human connection. What emerged was that each participant became aware of death, and the burden of loss, as a fact of life, often leading to a meaningful re-evaluation in their sense of themselves, their relationships and their actions. Sharing their experiences of loss with others was helpful, meaningful and influenced by language. Cultural understandings of masculinity affected the participants’ meaning making, and preconceived ideas of what their meaning making ‘should’ look like, as well as stereotypes of what bereaved men would like, were unhelpful. Recommendations based on the research findings include active, empathic listening to each individual bereaved person, demonstrating a curiosity and interest in their gendered experience and how this impacts their meaning making process. Future longitudinal research would be beneficial to understand the process of bereaved men’s meaning making over time
Online tutoring system for programming courses to improve exam pass rate
Get PDFUniversity students enrolled in the first year of the Computer Science degree may have problems approaching programming, negatively affecting their study during the course. Tutoring programming projects are very important in helping students with difficulty in learning by providing the right approach to study, improving their knowledge and skills in computing. The aim of this work is to realize a new Java Programming tutoring online course that allows students to have an effective online tool to achieve the learning goals of the course and this will enhance the programming exam pass rate. The course we have designed consists of tools to help students with video tutorials, self-assessment quizzes, code evaluations and exercises to solve using an online Java editor. Because the Moodle platform lacks tools to check the quality of the code syntax, a new software was created. It performs a syntax analysis of the Java code and, as a tutor, automatically provides feedbacks and tips to the students to improve the quality. For each online tool the immediate feedback technique is used to amplify students' engagement. A Clustering Machine Learning technique is performed to identify different students' behaviors. A correlation between them and the final performance showed the most influential features of the completed activities. Quantitative analysis highlighted the effectiveness of the tutoring system and the online course designed in this work to enhance the final exam pass rate. At the end, students filled a questionnaire to report their perception and satisfaction about the course
A contrastive model with local factor clustering for semi-supervised few-shot learning
Get PDFLearning novel classes with a few samples per class is a very challenging task in deep learning. To mitigate this issue, previous studies have utilized an additional dataset with extensively labeled samples to realize transfer learning. Alternatively, many studies have used unlabeled samples that originated from the novel dataset to achieve few-shot learning, i.e., semi-supervised few-shot learning. In this paper, an easy but efficient semi-supervised few-shot learning model is proposed to address the embeddings mismatch problem that results from inconsistent data distributions between the novel and base datasets, where samples with the same label approach each other while samples with different labels separate from each other in the feature space. This model emphasizes pseudo-labeling guided contrastive learning. We also develop a novel local factor clustering module to improve the ability to obtain pseudo-labels from unlabeled samples, and this module fuses the local feature information of labeled and unlabeled samples. We report our experimental results on the mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet datasets for both five-way one-shot and five-way five-shot settings and achieve better performance than previous models. In particular, the classification accuracy of our model is improved by approximately 11.53% and 14.87% compared to the most advanced semi-supervised few-shot learning model we know in the five-way one-shot scenario. Moreover, ablation experiments in this paper show that our proposed clustering strategy demonstrates accuracy improvements of about 4.00% in the five-way one-shot and five-way five-shot scenarios compared to two popular clustering methods
FeCa-based layered double hydroxide, a high-performance phosphorus adsorbent in constructed wetlands and ecological dams - a pilot scale study
No full textResearch studies have modified traditional substances to seek fast-acting removal of phosphorus in constructed wetlands (CWs) and ecological dams, rather than develop a brand-new nano-adsorbent. This work synthesized FeCa-based layered double hydroxide (FeCa-LDH) with a chemical co-precipitation method, and the performance, mechanism and factors of phosphorus removal were investigated. FeCa-LDH showed a marked ability to adsorb phosphorus from waste water, with a removal efficiency of 94.4% and 98.2% in CWs and ecological dams, respectively. Both FTIR and XPS spectrum evidenced that FeCa-LDH removed phosphorus via electrostatic and hydrogen-bonding adsorption, as well as a coordination reaction and interlayer anion exchange. FeCa-LDH showed a higher capacity to remove phosphorus in alkaline and neutral waste water than in acid conditions. Co-occurrence anions, which influenced the efficiency of the phosphorus removal capacity are considered in the sequence below: CO32− ≈ HCO3− > SO42− > NO3−. Innovatively, FeCa-LDH was not affected by the low-temperature limitation for CWs, and phosphorus removal efficiency at 5 °C was almost equal to that at 25 °C. These results cast a new idea on the construction, application and phosphorus removal performance of CWs and ecological dams
The role of Kurdish women advocates in creating global solidarity to increase human rights
No full textDevelopment and measurement of a resilience indicator for cyber-socio-technical systems: the allostatic load
Get PDFManagement of cyber-socio-technical processes often suffers from misalignments of process descriptions according to formal organization documents or manager views (Work-As-Imagined) with actual work practices as performed by sharp-end operators (Work-As-Done). Even if sometimes the accomplishment of a process requires workers to diverge from the Work-As-Imagined, the corresponding changes can potentially cause organisational tensions in the overall system and lead to safety incidents. This consideration led us to define a new resilience indicator, named allostatic load, to capture such misalignments, and the corresponding level of organisational tensions, a cyber-socio-technical system is exposed to. Then, we propose a method to measure it by leveraging semantic technologies, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) to model industrial processes, the WAx conceptual framework to keep track of the variety of the different process perspectives, and a crowd-based approach to elicit industrial knowledge. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of the approach in two real case studies related to a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant and an enterprise in the aluminium sector
On Becoming
No full textThe period of the 1950-60s ushered in a new global paradigm in both theatrical and musical performance. Specifically, over 400 years of using the human voice in a specific (Bel Canto) manner – ‘emphatic voice use’ (Clarke, 2016), traditional European compositional and orchestration techniques came to an end. These changes have dramatically affected how communities practice and relate to music and commercial musical theatre around the world. My earlier life was dedicated to the arts and a greatly changed music and theatrical landscape. I now find myself challenging the current paradigm that we find ourselves in.
The above statement reflects my intention to look at the last 8 years of specific Public Works and activities I have undertaken, and in so doing, unpack my professional experiences, responses, insights, and learnings as I step away from the ‘status quo’ and merge traditional artistic orthodoxy with refined modern sensibilities. Inasmuch as the auto-ethnographical approach to this paper is specific to my experience, it also shines a broader light on aspects of artistry within our commercial musical theatre communities, on organizational development and leadership, and on the purpose and importance of civic associations (as well as our own place and purpose within them)