Telesimulation Innovation on the Teaching of SPIKES Model on Sharing Bad News.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) brought to the world, an unprecedented emergency, which dramatically affected the face-to-face teaching in higher education academia. University faculty and students had to shift overnight to an online and remote course instruction. They were neither trained nor prepared and had limited resources and infrastructure. Palliative Care and Oncology Stream Faculty at Aga Khan University, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Pakistan, piloted an innovative academic project using telesimulation (TS). Trainee nurse interns were taught communication skills and the art of breaking bad news to palliative clients using the SPIKES model through TS. To incorporate best practices for simulation-based experiences, we used the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning to standardize and implement TS with 141 interns. This review article documents how the faculty planned and implemented the TS strategy during COVID-19. It outlines the challenges and the lessons learnt from implementation and feedback from faculty and students. This information could be useful in the future execution of TS, in any communication and counseling course, since COVID-19 has impacted the future educational course design and pedagogy worldwide.

Challenges in Teaching Palliative Care Module Virtually during COVID-19 Era.

With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the global community, routine activities of universities, offices, and industries have been hindered. People are being forced to rethink the ways of working virtually from home for providing education, business, and health services in this social distancing during the COVID era. This sudden shift also posed challenges of online teaching in a private university, in urban Karachi, Pakistan. The Aga Khan University, School of Nursing and Midwifery recently conducted an online palliative care module using a virtual learning environment and Microsoft Teams for Trainee Nurse Interns. Although the first experience of online teaching and learning was a successful venture for faculty and students, in a lockdown situation, numerous challenges were also encountered being a lower middle-income country. The issues of electricity shutdown, Internet connectivity, and quality assurance were anticipated on transition to online pedagogy, but backup plans were formed to make execution promising.

Feed-forward: Paving ways for students' subsequent learning.

BACKGROUND: Written feedback assists students in refining their future academic work. However, students prefer having feed-forward instead of feedback by their instructors that are the comments provided to them on drafts prior to the actual assignment submission. The current literature describes two common ways to convey feed-forward: the foremost one is on outlines while the second is on drafts. However, no existing literature had been found yet for sufficient guidance on the ideal approach of feed-forward to facilitate students' subsequent learning. DESIGN: A Quasi-experimental study design was employed to determine the effectiveness of feed-forward on outline versus drafts. SETTING: Study was conducted in a private nursing institution in Karachi, Pakistan. PARTICIPANTS: 118 third-year undergraduate nursing students participated in the study. METHODS: Using consecutive sampling, 118 students were enrolled and equally divided in to two groups, each comprising of 59 students in the control and intervention arm. Control group received feed-forward through standard practice i.e. on their assignment outline while the intervention group received feed-forward on the draft of their scholarly paper. RESULTS: The performance of intervention arm had an upper hand over that of control wing as portrayed by their increased overall assignment and academic writing scores (of students on IELTs bands). The set outcomes also reflected better results in terms of the (reduced) frequency of visits to their instructors for clarification of written feedback. All in all, this research deduced that feed-forward on drafts is far more beneficial in contrast to that on an outline as it reinforces students' learning. CONCLUSION: The study findings affirmed that feed-forward is a useful strategy to enhance students' subsequent learning.

The influence of psychosocial factors on academic performance of adolescents: a quality assurance project.

Adolescence is a time of rapid psychological and physiological changes and is associated with anxiety and mental distress. This project looks at the potential of school-based programs to reduce these negative effects of academic performance in both the short- and long-term. This study was conducted in a private school in Karachi, Pakistan between October 1998 and December 2006 on 305 students with low academic performance. Results show that students scoring low grades had a mean of 55 + 2.8 and postintervention score of 56 + 2.6. The intervention package significantly created a difference in reducing the number of students receiving low grades. Qualitative analysis showed that study participants had enhanced self-esteem, confidence levels, positive attitudes towards learning, improved time management and decision-making skills. This suggests that in an academic institution, the presence of a professional support system enhances learning and coping mechanisms.