ABSTRACT
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges to nursing practice globally. However, utilizing digital notebook applications to support nursing student practices may be an effective tool for surgical nursing practicum.Objective: This study aimed to design a blended learning curriculum for surgical nursing practicum, utilizing a digital notebook platform. Methods: This study applied the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) model to create a blended learning curriculum for surgical nursing practicum, employing the OneNote application platform. The study included three experts and 90 third-year nursing students who evaluated the model. The study was conducted from July 2021 to March 2022 at the Faculty of Nursing, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.Results: The experts rated the model highly (Mean = 4.33, SD = 0.57). The satisfaction level of the students with the blended learning curriculum using a digital notebook application was also high (Mean = 4.88, SD = 0.31).Conclusion: The blended learning curriculum using a digital notebook application for surgical nursing practicum was satisfactory for learners. The results from this research can be applied in online learning or incorporated into nursing clinical practicum curricula during and even postpandemic. The study results may also serve as an example or a piece of basic information to further develop an advanced online platform for teaching learning, either in Thailand or globally.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the Bioinformatics course to switch from on-site teaching to remote learning. This shift has prompted a change in teaching methods and laboratory activities. Students need to have a basic understanding of DNA sequences and how to analyze them using custom scripts. To facilitate learning, we have modified the course to use Jupyter Notebook, which offers an alternative approach to writing custom scripts for basic DNA sequence analysis. This approach allows students to acquire the necessary skills while working remotely. It is a versatile and user-friendly platform that can be used to combine explanations, code, and results in a single document. This feature enables students to interact with the code and results, making the learning process more engaging and effective. Jupyter Notebook provides a hybrid approach to learning basic Python scripting and genomics that is effective for remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
This innovative practice full paper presents a case of teaching modeling, simulation, and performance evaluation course online during the COVID-19 pandemic for graduate students. The course includes theoretical and practical sessions with varying complexity. Students should have a good background in math, statistics, and probability. Students must also have good experience in one of the computer programming languages to solve the homework and work on the term project. The challenge is how to teach these topics online and engage the students in the course as they learn in face-to-face classes. Delivering the course using PowerPoint slides and a whiteboard is not suitable for teaching the class online. Therefore, there must be an alternative way to deliver the course online. We noticed a growing interest in using Jupyter Notebook in teaching, which motivated us to apply it to the mentioned course with some innovations. Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows us to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. We want to share our experience teaching this course online using Jupyter Notebook in this innovative practice. We will share the course development plan, delivery mode, lessons learned, and student feedback. I will also highlight maximizing the benefits of the Jupyter Notebook using add-ins and tools useful for teaching, such as converting the Jupyter Notebook to a slide show. Developing courses in Jupyter Notebook could be time-consuming and frustrating, especially if there are a lot of math equations, tables, and drawings. This effort pays off in terms of the quality of the instruction and learning, and it gives students a tool to help them practice and engage with the course material. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Remote learning has become increasingly prevalent in the past decade. The current covid climate has provided an exponential boost for concurrent usage with video conferencing, specifically remote learning. For a good learning experience, the system needs to provide consistent performance and responsiveness of all applications in the concurrent use case while also delivering a good battery life to keep students engaged. Additionally, the education PC segment is typically budget conscious and fan-less, with a thermal design power of 6 Watts. Customers prefer to reuse existing chassis, thermal solutions and avoid high-cost bill of material, which comes with power-saving features. In this paper, we present the approach to optimizing video conferencing use case within the constraints of the education PC segment, which comes with the challenge of maintaining perf/watt. We also present pursued optimizations and associated learnings for design, software, and system tuning to enhance performance and battery life and provide a good user experience for video conferencing and concurrent use cases. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Shutdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have had extensive impacts on professional and volunteer-based biodiversity and conservation efforts. We evaluated the impact of the widespread pandemic-related closures in the spring of 2020 on participation patterns and rates on a national and a state-by-state basis in the United States in four biodiversity-themed community science programs: eBird, eButterfly, iNaturalist, and Nature's Notebook. We compared the number of participants, observations submitted, and proportion of observations collected in urban environments in spring 2020 to the expected values for these metrics based on activity in the previous five years (2015-2019), which in many cases exhibited underlying growth. At the national scale, eButterfly and Nature's Notebook exhibited declines in the number of participants and number of observations submitted during the spring of 2020 and iNaturalist and eBird showed growth in both measures. On a state-by-state basis, the patterns varied geographically and by program. The more popular programs - iNaturalist and eBird - exhibited increases in the Eastern U.S. in both the number of observations and participants and slight declines in the West. Further, there was a widespread increase in observations originating from urban areas, particularly in iNaturalist and eBird. Understanding the impacts of lockdowns on participation patterns in these programs is crucial for proper interpretation of the data. The data generated by these programs are highly valuable for documenting impacts of pandemic-related closures on wildlife and plants and may suggest patterns seen in other community science programs and in other countries.