Jones & Bartlett Learning Health Blog

If you teach in a fully online or a hybrid class, you know the Discussion Board, Forum, or Threads, whatever name they go by, are considered the "heart" of the online classroom. At least that's what these vehicles for asynchronous discussions are supposed to be. When used properly, online discussions can be the epicenter of intellectual challenges and interactions between the students and the instructor. Participants can used their higher order thinking skills (HOTS), actively engage in the material, and be pushed to the next level of their career development. Or, in less exhilarating instances, students parrot back material from the text (sometimes not bothering to put in quotes), respond to the minimal number of other students, per the syllabus, and check off another item on their to do list to get through the course.

Nothing makes an author quite as happy as seeing their book on the shelf, virtual or real, available to the world, at last! Now that our book “baby,” Cases in Health Care Management has been released, inquiring minds want to know how to use the text, in addition to pairing it to Introduction to Health Care Management.  Here are some suggestions for ways to make this book even more useful, engaging, and interactive for your students—and for you as the instructor.

I am delighted to have Nancy H. Shanks, my fellow Jones & Bartlett Learning author and good friend with me to talk about her new book to be released in Spring, 2013, Cases in Health Care Management http://www.jblearning.com/catalog/9781449674298/

Last month I wrote about the importance of good case studies to engage readers’ higher order thinking skills (HOTS) and that the case study method is an example, par excellence, of problem-based learning (PBL), an educational approach that engages the student and provides opportunities for deeper learning. The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of the role play as a useful teaching method to further engage students’ HOTs, the pros and cons of using role play, and to offer some tips on how set the stage for and evaluate role play in your courses.

A health care management case study is a short story depicting an organizational scenario which can be non-fiction or fiction. As in all short stories, it should have a beginning, middle, and an end. And it should also engage readers’ higher order thinking skills (HOTS). The case study method is an example, par excellence, of problem-based learning (PBL), an educational approach that engages the student and provides opportunities for deeper learning. The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of the HOTs, the attributes of a good case study, the neuroscience of why case studies are effective, and to offer some tips on selecting and writing good case studies.

Over the past two decades, one of the oft repeated complaints  from colleagues is that our students don't know how to write. Here are some explanations I've heard.

Technology has brought us many wonders, among which are iPhones, iPads, and online education. Born into an era of these constantly evolving gadgets, is it any surprise that Generation Y has a culture of sharing everything? They share music, videos, jokes, and status updates, including check-ins and bad break-ups. Texting has given rise to a new language, so much so that a glossary of abbreviations is required for parents to understand what their kids are saying to each other. Gross (2011) sees plagiarism as a cultural issue of this generation that loves to share.

As educators, it has become more challenging for us to teach students proper business language and appropriate boundaries. Perhaps the most challenging of these boundaries for us to teach is not to fabricate materials or appropriate other people's work and present it as their own. Is it really their fault that they have difficulty with this concept? What are they seeing in the news? Here are but a few examples.

• A college dean discovered his work plagiarized by academics (Fish, 2010)

• Mitch Albon, author of Tuesdays with Morrie, fabricated material for a sports column (Mediamythbusters, n.d.)

• Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian, paid an author for using large portions of his book without attribution (Kearns, 2009).

What were the consequences for these people? In some instances, they were terminated from their jobs. In others, the consequences were a little public humiliation, and they continued about their lives.

My work was plagiarized by two college professors who submitted a paper to a prestigious journal. Unfortunately for them, I was one of the reviewers. They used a five-hundred word published abstract of mine verbatim, in its entirety, without any attribution. When I discovered the theft, I had to document and prove it was my work. What were their consequences? I have no idea. The authors were blinded to me and the journal editor never told me. If journalists, authors and academics struggle with the notion of not stealing someone else's intellectual property, why are we so shocked and angry when it occurs in our classrooms, be they face to face or online?

Why does the thought of teamwork assignments make entire classes of students and professors cringe? Despite years of research and numerous articles emphasizing the need for teamwork experiences in higher education, few instructors have been formally educated in methods to teach teamwork. There are even fewer courses devoted exclusively to teamwork, despite some excellent texts (Freshman, Rubino, & Chassiakos, 2009). Many of us stumble along, and, if we are lucky, find mentors who have years of experience in classroom teamwork assignments. I was fortunate to have colleagues who believed in the need for teamwork for our discipline, even when many other faculty members found it too frustrating to deal with.

We shouldn't wait until people are in post-graduate programs to introduce them to applied teamwork (Nash, 2008; Newell, 1990). That road leads to disappointment. Habits of doing everything alone have been instilled and teaching teamwork must undo many of these "I can do it all" or "I should do it all" attitudes. Teamwork education must begin at the undergraduate level and continue through graduate school and beyond (Drake, Goldsmith, & Strachan, 2006; Lerner, Magrane, & Friedman, 2009). Once employed, our graduates will be judged by their supervisors and colleagues on their ability to be team players. In healthcare, lives literally depend on good teamwork (Sehgal, Fox, Vidyarthi, Sharpe, Gearhart, Bookwalter, Baker, Aldredge, Blegen, & Wachter, 2008).

So, how can instructors encourage effective teamwork participation in the online environment? Here are some tried and true methods I have used you can apply to your courses.

• Post a syllabus that explicitly addresses the value of teamwork and the rubrics by which students will be judged. Students want and deserve to know what they need to do to achieve their educational goals in a course. The proportion of their grade for the course related to teamwork should be meaningful. One to five percent of a course grade is not adequate to motivate students to actively engage in teamwork. A bare minimum of ten percent of the course grade should be assigned to the team projects. In addition, for teamwork, they should be judged by their peers, not only by the instructor. There are a number of teamwork rubrics; I happen to like the one I created with my colleagues (Buchbinder, Cox & Casciani, 2012, p. 374). The tool addresses key criteria for successful team players, including: attendance, preparation, collaboration and goal identification, active participation, open-mindedness and willingness to modify opinions, concise presentation of ideas, timely submission of assignments, respectful and considerate interactions with teammates, fulfillment of responsibilities and active work on achievement of group consensus. Used as an Excel file, students can easily total up the scores. Students are required to explain why they gave a teammate a score of under 3 or over 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.  They must also indicate whether they would work with this person again (Yes/No) (Buchbinder, Cox & Casciani, 2012, p. 374).
• Establish ground rules for netiquette. Most universities have guidelines for student civility and for respectful online interaction with instructors and peers. Place these guidelines in your syllabus and separately in your online course, and make a point of referring students to these documents. If a student behaves inappropriately later on, he or she cannot claim ignorance.