Engineering for Chaos

The global COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way we live, learn, and teach - impacting both "how we learn" and "what we learn." Software system resilience has emerged as a critical concept, a departure from historical system objectives obsessed with high performance. In practice, there are many situations when development focused on efficiency, creates a system that is not very resilient. Fortunately, some technology companies have prioritized stability and availability over efficiency in order to deliver to customers a more consistent experience. Governments also value resilience to reliably serve their communities in the face of crises like cyber hacking and COVID-19. System resilience is a topic often neglected in computer science curricula. This paper reports on a recent virtual ACM SPLASH-E Education Symposium panel session held in November 2020 that discussed resilience, efficiency, and the impact of COVID-19 on computer science education. The panel featured Steven Fraser (panel impresario) and panelists Rebecca Mercuri, Landon Noll, Ales Plsek, and Moshe Vardi.

A Department-Sponsored, Hospital-Based Pathology Education Symposium Is a Cost-Effective Method to Provide Laboratory Staff With Highly Rated Continuing Education Experiences

Context.— Continuing education improves the quality of medical care and is a required part of most health care professions. Although a variety of educational modules are available online or at external conferences, completion of these activities can be expensive and time-consuming. In addition, externally produced modules may have limited applicability to a local practice. Objective.— To assess the ability of an economically efficient, locally produced, department-wide pathology educational seminar to efficiently meet education requirements for a large number of employees in a large health system. Design.— A multiday continuing education symposium was produced annually from 2013 through 2019 at no cost to participants. Metrics related to attendance, number of educational sessions available for registration, and participant satisfaction were tabulated, trended, and compared with similar metrics tabulated from an external continuing education conference that was offered from 2011 through 2012. Results.— The production of an internal, hospital-based educational symposium increased employee attendance (mean of 635 attendees per year versus 247 at the external program; P < .001) while reducing mean annual cost per attendee ($51 versus $140, P < .001). The number of sessions produced for the internal symposium was 39 per year on average, compared with 12 per year at the external program. Technical staff, residents, fellows, and faculty all contributed to internal educational programming, helping to build a team culture in the department. Overall employee satisfaction was 96.2%. Conclusions.— An internal educational pathology symposium led to cost-efficient distribution of continuing education credits to a large number of technical staff, with a high degree of reported employee satisfaction.

Reflections from an interprofessional education symposium on the use of art to inform clinical practice

A novel, student-organized event, the ‘Art in Healthcare’ interprofessional education symposium was held in November 2018 as the inaugural event hosted by the Windsor Interprofessional Health Student Collaboration. Students attending represented five different programmes of study and came from five different campuses, all in Ontario. The impetus for it was grounded in the existing landscape of interprofessional education and the use of narrative and artistic approaches to guide reflection on professional identity for health professionals. The structure of the symposium included a keynote address, workshops, and a closing ceremony. Pre- and post-symposium surveys were administered and filled out by students and helped to inform this reflection. Participants were given the space, time, and artistic tools to engage in critical thought about their past experiences as health care professional students. They used narrative and artistic approaches to express complex and difficult thoughts and ideas which helped to illuminate shared experiences and create shared awareness. Through reflection and conscious decisions regarding representation of ideas through alternative artistic media, students explored their feelings and identities. The ‘Art in Healthcare’ symposium introduced new tools and methods for health professional students to engage in critical reflection, providing many benefits for students and their patients alike.

Living With the Burden of Pseudobulbar Affect: A Qualitative Analysis of the Effects of Education on Patient Experience

Pseudobulbar affect (PBA) is associated with several neurological diseases and is underrecognized in clinical practice; however, PBA symptoms are often attributed to psychiatric or mood disorders rather than to neurological etiology. Until recently, there were no US Food and Drug Administration therapies approved for treating this condition, and there are currently few resources to support patients in the recognition and self-management of PBA symptoms. We evaluated the impact of a virtual education symposium on patient knowledge and self-efficacy via qualitative interviews. This evaluation of education impact provides unique insight into the experience of managing PBA symptoms; suggests that there is extensive need for educational resources to support patients with PBA and enable them to engage effectively with their providers; and affirms that online learning is an effective mechanism for delivering education to patients that enables them to more effectively self-manage symptoms in the context of chronic neurological conditions such as PBA.

The Nature of Music Teacher Preparation Scholarship Through the Lens of the Journal of Music Teacher Education

This chapter examines the Journal of Music Teacher Education (JMTE) from 1991 to 2017, including JMTE’s mission, review processes, and content of 403 articles. Of particular interest are changes in journal size, topic emphases, quantitative versus qualitative methodologies, ratio of research (new data) to interest articles (ideas based on existent data), and collaborative authorships. A review of related research involving trends in journal publication and scholarship of teaching and learning is included, as well as lists of JMTE editors, editorial review board members, and individual author productivity. Relationships between journal growth and strength of the sponsoring professional society (Society for Music Teacher Education Symposium and Graduate Student Research Forum) are discussed. Comparisons between the vitality of JMTE and the demise of Quarterly Journal of Teaching and Learning are explored. Suggestions for future analyses of professional journals conclude the chapter.