Jones & Bartlett Learning Health Blog

Excerpted from the Preface of Health Program Planning and Evaluation, 4th Edition,
by L. Michele Issel, PhD, RN, University of North Carolina College of Health and Human Services Department of Public Health, Charlotte, North Carolina

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?

This spring, Jones & Bartlett Learning is pleased to bring you Podcasts of interviews with the authors of our newest titles in Public Health and Health Administration:

Dr. Michael Merson is the lead editor of Global Health: Diseases, Programs, Systems, and Policies (formerly titled International Public Health), which will be available in a new Third Edition this August.

Michael Merson is the director of Duke University's Global Health Institute. He is the former Dean of Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine, and the former Director of Yale University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and one of the founding directors of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

RICHARD SKOLNIK, MPA is the author of the new Second Edition of Global Health 101 (formerly titled Essentials of Global Health). Mr. Skolnik is the winner of numerous honors for teaching, has taught global health for 8 years, and has more than 30 years of experience as a global health practitioner in multilateral, university, and NGO settings. He has been actively involved in dealing with critical issues in global health at country level and at the highest levels of international health policy making.

On September 11, 2001, my husband was attending a week-long course in New York City. As I stood in my kitchen in Baltimore, Maryland, drinking a cup of coffee and watching Good Morning America, I heard Diane Sawyer say, “We have breaking news.” Horrified, I watched the scenes of the Twin Towers under attack—and suddenly realized I had no idea where my husband was. After four frantic hours of trying to reach him, he finally returned my call. His hotel was next to the Empire State Building, in walking distance of the attacks. Almost all the surgeons at the meeting climbed onto a bus to go to a treatment center to help the victims. My husband, sensing the futility of this volunteerism, did not go. His instincts were correct. When the busload of physicians returned, they reported they stood around for twelve hours without access to news and did nothing.