Co-published with In 2007, the American Association of Colleges and Universities named learning communities a high-impact practice because of the potential of these communities to provide coherence ...to and ultimately improve undergraduate education. Institutional leaders have demonstrated a commitment to providing LLCs, but they currently do so primarily with anecdotal information to guide their work. As a result, there is substantial variation in organizational structure, collaboration, academic and social environments, programmatic integration, student outcomes, and overall quality related to LLC participation. To establish a stronger, more unified basis for designing and delivering effective LLCs, the authors of Living-Learning Communities that Work collaborated on the development of a comprehensive empirical framework for achieving the integrating potential of LLCs. This framework is designed to help practitioners guide the design, delivery, and assessment of LLCs. This book thoughtfully combines research and field-tested practice to document the essential components for best practices in living learning communities and presents them as a clear blueprint - the LLC best practices model - for LLC design. Practitioners, researchers, and institutional leaders can use the book as a guide to more effectively allocate resources to create and sustain LLCs and to realize the potential of these communities to improve undergraduate education.
This study employed a grounded theory approach to understand group work training for mental health professionals (MHPs) working with Syrian refugee children in Turkey. Specifically, the authors set ...out to discover the barriers that prevent MHPs from conducting effective group work, elaborate on needed content and structure of the groups, highlight their potential benefits, and provide recommendations for conducting more effective group work to mitigate traumatic symptoms of Syrian refugee children. Interviews were conducted with 10 MHPs, including social workers (n = 4), psychologists (n = 5) and a psychiatrist (n = 1). Results revealed three themes including, i) Barriers for group work, ii) Benefits of group work, and iii) Recommendations for group work. Barriers included issues related to culture and language, access, intervention, organization and system-related barriers, and barriers stemming from ongoing trauma and abuse of Syrian refugee children, as well as secondary trauma of MHPs providing services. Benefits included MHPs' perceived personal and interpersonal development skills, trauma resilience, and adjustment and adaptation for Syrian refugee children. Recommendations to mitigate the barriers for group work included the necessity of short term, cost-effective, ongoing crisis interventions that address stabilization and regulation of refugee children's functioning. The study highlighted the importance of the effectiveness of interventions linked to qualifications of MHPs, designing group interventions that target the secondary trauma of MHPs, and the importance of psychosocial awareness interventions that aim to increase knowledge about refugee rights.
The Building Young Men group mentoring program is a new and innovative youth intervention program located in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Funded and facilitated by a professional sporting ...organization, the program incorporates the practices of group work, youth work, and mentoring to support adolescent males in exploring safe and healthy transitions into adulthood. The authors have offered the term "Dynamic Group Mentoring," to describe the experience at the intersection of the interventions of group work, youth work, and mentoring as practiced in the Building Young Men program. This model of group mentoring offers significant positive outcomes for adolescent male participants, particularly in supporting the development of confidence, trust, agency, and social capital in their lives.
Cooperative Learning (CL) has been encouraged in Ethiopia’s secondary schools as an important strategy to facilitate effective student learning. However, the effectiveness of CL hinges, among other ...factors, on appropriate assessment of students’ group work. Challenges faced by teachers and students in implementing assessment of group work have remained an obstacle to the effective use of CL. The aim of this study was therefore to examine what Ethiopian secondary school teachers and students, respectively, consider to be problems and obstacles in the way of efficiently implementing student the cooperative group work assessment. Accordingly, 213 teachers and 212 students were randomly selected for a questionnaire survey. In addition, two teachers and five students were also interviewed and a focus group discussion (FGD) was carried out in each of the five schools selected for data gathering. The data acquired through the questionnaire was analyzed through one-sample t-test while the data obtained through interviews and FGD were analyzed through qualitative verbal descriptions. The findings indicate the main challenges from the point of view of the teachers to be their inadequate training on the assessment of group work process and individual contributions; uncertainty on what should be assessed, and heavy workloads. From the students’ perspective, the main challenges were inadequate teacher support and follow up and equal reward for unequal contribution by members to group work.
How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed? I use data on academics' publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit ...is allocated under such uncertainty. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about ability, coauthored papers are noisy, providing no specific information about each contributor's skills. I find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of coauthoring choices. Women, however, are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor. The result is much less pronounced among women who coauthor with other women.
Group work has recently gained attention in educational settings, and culture is an important factor influencing group work so the connection between the American culture and attitudes towards group ...work is worth studying. The present corpus-based study utilises the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to determine the current and the longitudinal traits of American cultural attitudes, which could influence the Americans’ disposition towards collective activities including group work. Analysing the American discourse of different academic genres, it was revealed that while the American culture is predominantly individualistic, it has some potential for collectivism. Interestingly, it was observed that the American cultural is getting slightly less individualistic over time, especially after its individualistic soar in the second half of the 90s.
Edge Computing (EC) is a new architecture that extends Cloud Computing (CC) services closer to data sources. EC combined with Deep Learning (DL) is a promising technology and is widely used in ...several applications. However, in conventional DL architectures with EC enabled, data producers must frequently send and share data with third parties, edge or cloud servers, to train their models. This architecture is often impractical due to the high bandwidth requirements, legalization, and privacy vulnerabilities. The Federated Learning (FL) concept has recently emerged as a promising solution for mitigating the problems of unwanted bandwidth loss, data privacy, and legalization. FL can co-train models across distributed clients, such as mobile phones, automobiles, hospitals, and more, through a centralized server, while maintaining data localization. FL can therefore be viewed as a stimulating factor in the EC paradigm as it enables collaborative learning and model optimization. Although the existing surveys have taken into account applications of FL in EC environments, there has not been any systematic survey discussing FL implementation and challenges in the EC paradigm. This paper aims to provide a systematic survey of the literature on the implementation of FL in EC environments with a taxonomy to identify advanced solutions and other open problems. In this survey, we review the fundamentals of EC and FL, then we review the existing related works in FL in EC. Furthermore, we describe the protocols, architecture, framework, and hardware requirements for FL implementation in the EC environment. Moreover, we discuss the applications, challenges, and related existing solutions in the edge FL. Finally, we detail two relevant case studies of applying FL in EC, and we identify open issues and potential directions for future research. We believe this survey will help researchers better understand the connection between FL and EC enabling technologies and concepts.
Teamwork skills are important professional competencies; teaching them can be challenging in online nursing education.
To describe the implementation of a three-stage model for successful group ...processes in an asynchronous online course and evaluate its effectiveness.
The three-stage model for group work was used to identify students' needs and concerns, and adaptations to the model were made to reflect specifics of the online environment. Prior to the beginning of the course, the faculty created guidelines and instructions for a group project, recorded a video explaining the benefits of group work, and provided a variety of resources. Faculty monitored and supported online group processes through all stages of group work. At the end of the course, 135 students completed an evaluation survey. Student responses were aggregated by frequent comments.
Most students described their group work experience as positive and enjoyable. Students reported learning a wide range of teamwork skills. All students recognized that group work skills are directly applicable to their future nursing practice.
It is possible to make online group projects successful and gratifying for students with appropriate evidence-based course design and carefully planned facilitation of group processes.
•Challenges with online group work can be overcome by utilizing a three-stage group work model with appropriate adaptations.•Careful group project design and faculty facilitation ensured successful outcomes and a positive experience for students.•Students reported learning a variety of teamwork skills and recognized their importance for future nursing practice.
•Students value learning about sustainability & alternatives to traditional accounting.•Problem-based learning is a valuable pedagogy to develop independent research skills.
This paper discusses the ...findings of a small ethnographic study that explored students’ perceptions of the value of problem-based learning in introducing sustainability, in a two semester elective accounting module at a post-1992 university in south-west England. Findings suggest that students believed that gaining knowledge of sustainability is essential for all accounting undergraduates, not just those who elect to follow a specialist module, and that problem-based learning is an appropriate and enabling method with which to introduce sustainability. It is also important for developing individual interest, building knowledge of various accounting, auditing, and reporting procedures, and motivating students. For those who wish to develop a sustainability in accounting module, a caveat is presented that delivery of sustainability within a core, single-semester module has potential implications for student motivation and depth of learning. Recommendations are made to help mitigate these potential issues and with the necessary amendments in place, the paper argues that sustainability should constitute a core module in all accounting programmes in the interests of students, the accounting profession, and society at large.
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