Finnish education in Australia
categories: academic library
Posts Tagged ‘Australia’
Tik Tok concerns
microcredentials and faculty
categories: badges, Digital literacy, gamification, gaming, information technology, instructional technology, learning
Why faculty need to talk about microcredentials
There is reason to believe that shorter, competency-based programs will play an important role in the university landscape in the coming years.
Australian commentator Stephen Matchett expands: “MCs are the wild west of post-compulsory education and training, with neither law on what they actually are or order as to how they interact with formal providers. … Until (or if) this is sorted by regulators there needs to be a sheriff providing workable rules that stop the cowboys running riot.”
The lack of standards is also an issue in Canada. While degree standards have been agreed upon – the Canadian Degree Qualification framework, contained in the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)’s 2007 Ministerial Statement on Quality Assurance of Degree Education in Canada, outlines expectations for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – the CMEC has yet to issue a pan-Canadian framework for microcredentials.
In the absence of a pan-Canadian model or definition, for the purposes of this column I will use the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s definition, put forward in its May 2021 report, Making Sense of Microcredentials:
“A microcredential is a representation of learning, awarded for completion of a short program that is focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes), and is sometimes related to other credentials.”
Developing and running effective microcredential programs is not simply a matter of bundling a group of existing classes into a new sub-degree level program (although there will certainly be some who try that approach). Effective microcredential programming needs to be an institution-wide effort, with appropriate resourcing and guidelines, along with effective recruiting and student support.
department chairs and other unit leaders to lead collegial discussions about the following questions:
- Gaps: who is not being served by our current degree offerings? Is there potential demand for our disciplinary knowledge and skills from people who don’t want a full degree program? Are there ways people could upgrade their skills by taking certain types of our courses? Can we identify potential short programs to meet new, distinct learning outcomes?
- Student diversity: are there opportunities to develop short programs that could introduce a new demographic of students to our discipline? How might microcredentials be developed that meet the needs and interests of Indigenous students, first-generation students, or international students?
- Connection: how might we create partnerships with external organizations to inform our understanding of skill-training needs? Can these partnerships be leveraged to create new career pathways for students, and/or new research opportunities for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students?
- Impact: in what ways do our discipline’s insights relate to Canada’s current and future public needs? How might our disciplinary knowledge be combined with knowledge from other disciplines to train students to help address particular challenges? In what ways could our discipline contribute to student competency development that we consider meaningful and impactful?
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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential
VR training for hospitals
categories: educational technology, VR
Nepean Hospital partners with Vantari VR for ICU training
https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/anz/nepean-hospital-partners-vantari-vr-icu-training
“By integrating Vantari VR into our education programme, trainees will already have advanced knowledge of the procedure before requiring clinician input. In addition, we hope Vantari VR will help our trainees have a more homogenous approach, as well as give repeated exposure to lesser performed procedures,”
Aside from Nepean Hospital, Vantari’s technology is also being used for training critical care practitioners at three other tertiary hospitals across Australia
Featuring flight-simulator technology, the Vantari VR training platform provides medical training through a VR headset and a laptop. Its modules cover most medical procedures and deliver steps recommended by college guidelines. Vantari sees its technology being applied beyond the ICU to other critical care specialities, such as emergency medicine and anaesthetics.
The startup said it is in the process of securing A$2 million ($1.5 million) in funding as part of its capital raise, which will close in December. This comes as it received a $100,000 grant from American video game company Epic Games early this year.
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More on immersive and nursing in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Immersive+and+nursing
Nurse’s Escape
categories: VR
https://sidequestvr.com/app/3848/nurses-escape
Nurse’s Escape is a VR game that simulates an escape room based on the five stages of the Sepsis Bundle. The purpose is to supplement nurse’s lecture-style curriculum with an interactive way to test nurse’s Sepsis knowledge. Sepsis is one of the leading causes of deaths and hospitalizations yearly, so equipping nurses with the right skills and information to treat sepsis in a timely manner can save lives and money. Help treat the millionaire’s illness before time runs out!
This game is sponsored by the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Nursing-Lincoln.
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Australian hospitals leveraging VR tech to fast-track clinician training
It only takes 10 minutes to practice a procedure in a session through a VR platform such as Vantari VR.
Using flight-simulator technology, Vantari VR provides medical training using a VR headset and laptop. Its modules cover 90% of medical procedures as part of doctors’ core training and deliver steps that are recommended by college guidelines.
In Fiona Stanley Hospital, for example, over 20 registrars have been educated to perform chest drain insertions.
Vantari VR was awarded a $100,000 grant from Epic Games, the American video game company behind the online game Fortnite. Presently, the startup seeks to raise $2 million from a funding round that will close in August.
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more on nursing and VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality+nursing
Sky News conspiracy theories
categories: Digital literacy, Facebook, information literacy, information technology, media literacy, YouTube
Jones uses segments from Sky News Australia in his program, particularly those from Sky’s Outsiders program, as “evidence” from mainstream media organisations to support his conspiracy theories.
The bite-sized videos carry advertising – and Sky shares the revenue with platforms like YouTube.
Last November, tech journalist Cam Wilson revealed in Business Insider that Sky News Australia had successfully built a Fox News-like online operation in Australia that dwarfs its terrestrial audience numbers. On YouTube, their videos have been viewed more than 500m times, more than any other Australian media organisation.
Wilson also reported that Sky’s Facebook posts had more total interactions in October than the ABC News, SBS News, 7News Australia, 9 News and 10 News First pages, and more shares than all of them combined.
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more on conspiracy theories in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=conspiracy+theories
Facebook Google Australia
Facebook has blocked all news content in Australia, but Google didn’t. Here’s what you need to know about the battle between Australia, Facebook, and Google over who pays for news online, and how it could affect the rest of the world👇https://t.co/Cd5YHQPngT
— Business Insider Tech (@SAI) February 18, 2021
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
more on GOogle in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=google
Australia and QAnon
Last year the Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report that found QAnon’s following had grown considerably in Australia during 2020, with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter driving increased engagement.
The report found Australia was the fourth largest country for QAnon activity, behind the US, UK and Canada. Its presence in Australia is also evident on less mainstream sites. For example as Canadian QAnon research Marc-Andre Argentino has pointed out, there were at least six Australian Q “research boards” on the site 8kun with about 4,000 posts by January last year. That had increased to 11 boards by the start of 2021.
Last year, Guardian Australia revealed QAnon had found a follower in Tim Stewart, a family friend of the prime Scott Morrison. Stewart was behind one of Australia’s largest QAnon-linked accounts, BurnedSpy34.
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more on QAnon in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=qanon
more on QAnon in Germany: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=qanon+germany
Embedded Librarian in Active Learning Environment
categories: academic library
Creating a Role for Embedded Librarians Within an Active Learning Environment
https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/561a2f7b-b7a8-395f-90c5-8855b830b939/
In 2013, the librarians at a small academic health sciences library reevaluated their mission, vision, and strategic plan to expand their roles. The school was transitioning to a new pedagogical culture and a new building designed to emphasize interprofessional education and active learning methodologies. Subsequent efforts to implement the new strategic plan resulted in the librarians joining curriculum committees and other institutional initiatives, such as an Active Learning Task Force, and participating in faculty development workshops. This participation has increased visibility and led to new roles and opportunities for librarians.
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Reflections on an Embedded Librarianship Approach: The Challenge of Developing Disciplinary Expertise in a New Subject Area
https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/805a60fc-08d5-383f-9ddc-4cac92262650/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/212696811.pdf
Embedded librarianship has emerged as a user-centred approach to academic library services, requiring an in-depth understanding of the education and research priorities of students and staff. User-centred approaches require the development of disciplinary expertise and engagement with the research culture of a particular subject area. This paper details the author’s experiences in situating his practice within the discipline of pharmacy and discusses some of the challenges around the scale and sustainability of such specialised support. Regardless of the extent to which a librarian is ‘embedded’, they must see themselves as learners, too, as they develop their understanding of the disciplines they support through an ongoing process of experiencing, reflecting, conceptualising and testing in their practice.
definition:
Embedded librarianship differs from traditional librarian roles in its focus on working in partnership with clients, rather than simply providing a support service (Carlson & Kneale, 2011).
In this sense, embedded librarianship is user-centred rather than library-centred and requires the librarian to develop a holistic understanding of the environment in which their client groups operate.
most training materials followed a one-size-fits-all approach, where students would be taken from locating background information and textbook chapters all the way to searching for primary evidence in a bibliographic database within the same hour. Most sessions ran over time and were overloaded with content. In some instances, students complained that they had already covered this content in their previous year.
While information literacy as a construct is valued by librarians, the term’s use remains
largely restricted to the library and information science (LIS) field and might even be labelled
undiscovered country for academics (McGuinness, 2006, p. 580). Academics often consider
IL instruction as a service provided by the library and do not see librarians as partners, nor
do they see the value in integrating course-specific IL training (Derakhshan & Singh, 2010).
a spectrum of embeddedness with 5 levels (2008, p. 442), from ‘entry level’, where the librarian might collaborate on assignment development and deliver a standalone IL session, to ‘co-teaching’, where the librarian co-teaches and develops discipline-specific course materials, lectures, assessment designs and grading in collaboration with academic staff. Their findings suggest that student performance is positively related to the level of librarian involvement
phenomenographic interview methodology, where the librarian is positioned as a ‘curricular
consultant’
My note (sarcastic): whoa, what a novelty; it is repeated for two decades at SCSU, but “hot water still not invented” and the ATT still does not have neither a faculty, nor ID, but the only Ph.D. in ID just got laid off.
Hallam, Thomas and Beach illustrate that the library is not singularly responsible for developing information and digital literacies, and therefore, a collaborative approach involving a range of stakeholders including academic staff, learning designers, educational technologists and others is required
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more on embedded librarianship in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=embedded+librarian