NARCIS: research information services on a national scale

As a national aggregator, NARCIS contains the scientific output of 27 institutional OAI-PMH repositories (IRs), with publications and descriptions of research data (datasets) from the Dutch universities, the Academy (KNAW), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the institute for Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS, http://www.dans.knaw.nl) and other research institutes. NARCIS also contains information from the Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) in the Netherlands on research, researchers (expertise) and research organisations. The data from the IRs and the CRISs in NARCIS are interlinked by identifiers such as the Digital Author Identifier (DAI), a unique identifier assigned to each researcher in the Netherlands. The NARCIS Suite (National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System: http://www.narcis.nl) consists of three main products: the NARCIS Portal (HTTP), the NARCIS Index (SRU) and the NARCIS Repository (OAI-PMH). The NARCIS Portal makes the combined data searchable and available to the public at a national level. Meeting the requirements of modern information systems requires continual development and a good understanding of NARCIS portal visitors and their needs

NARCIS: research information services on a national scale

As a national aggregator, NARCIS contains the scientific output of 27 institutional OAI-PMH repositories (IRs), with publications and descriptions of research data (datasets) from the Dutch universities, the Academy (KNAW), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the institute for Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS, http://www.dans.knaw.nl) and other research institutes. NARCIS also contains information from the Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) in the Netherlands on research, researchers (expertise) and research organisations. The data from the IRs and the CRISs in NARCIS are interlinked by identifiers such as the Digital Author Identifier (DAI), a unique identifier assigned to each researcher in the Netherlands. The NARCIS Suite (National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System: http://www.narcis.nl) consists of three main products: the NARCIS Portal (HTTP), the NARCIS Index (SRU) and the NARCIS Repository (OAI-PMH). The NARCIS Portal makes the combined data searchable and available to the public at a national level. Meeting the requirements of modern information systems requires continual development and a good understanding of NARCIS portal visitors and their needs

Change Management Support in Postgraduate Medical Education: A Change for the Better

Curriculum change is inevitably a part of postgraduate medical education (PGME) due to a necessity to rapidly adapt to changes in societal needs, educational philosophy and technological advances. Initiating, adopting as well as sustaining successful change can be very challenging especially in complex and time-constrained environments such as healthcare and PGME. Indeed, research has shown that educational changes do not always lead to the desired adjustments in practice. Surprisingly, implementation processes in healthcare and, more particularly, those in medical education are rarely supported by change management principles despite the scale and implications of curriculum reforms that justify guidance of such implementation processes. Insights from a change management perspective could help to smoothen the transition from theory to practice by guiding implementation processes and provide support in routinizing innovations in standard practice. A thorough description about change from an educational as well as a change management perspective is made, followed by the experiences with introducing change management principles into PGME. Lastly, the potential of change management principles for future changes in medical education, and their practical implications, is presented

How To Get Your Clinical Teaching Team Ready For Curriculum Change: A Practical Guide

Our health care system is constantly adapting to change at an increasingly rapid pace. Unavoidably, this also applies to the field of medical education. As a result, clinical teaching teams face the challenging task of successfully implementing the proposed changes in daily practice. It goes without saying that implementing change takes time and that you need to be patient. However, a successful change process needs more than that. Change models or strategies could offer a helping hand. The questionnaire Specialty training’s Organizational Readiness for curriculum Change (STORC) is a tool aiming to do just that. With a focus on readiness for change, this questionnaire tries to support implementation efforts in PGME. Additionally, since change is a team effort, it focusses on clinical teaching teams particularly. In this paper, we offer a practical guide for clinical teaching teams on how to deal with any concerns or hurdles detected in any of the core elements of readiness for change, in order to smoothen and support the educational change processes these teams are confronted with

Analysing the correlation between social network analysis measures and performance of students in social network-based engineering education

Social network-based engineering education (SNEE) is designed and implemented as a model of Education 3.0 paradigm. SNEE represents a new learning methodology, which is based on the concept of social networks and represents an extended model of project-led education. The concept of social networks was applied in the real-life experiment, considering two different dimensions: (1) to organize the education process as a social network-based process; and (2) to analyze the students' interactions in the context of evaluation of the students learning performance. The objective of this paper is to present a new model for students evaluation based on their behavior during the course and its validation in comparison with the traditional model of students' evaluation. The validation of the new evaluation model is made through an analysis of the correlation between social network analysis measures (degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and average tie strength) and the grades obtained by students (grades for quality of work, grades for volume of work, grades for diversity of work, and final grades) in a social network-based engineering education. The main finding is that the obtained correlation results can be used to make the process of the students' performance evaluation based on students interactions (behavior) analysis, to make the evaluation partially automatic, increasing the objectivity and productivity of teachers and allowing a more scalable process of evaluation. The results also contribute to the behavioural theory of learning performance evaluation. More specific findings related to the correlation analysis are: (1) the more different interactions a student had (degree centrality) and the more frequently the student was between the interaction paths of other students (betweenness centrality), the better was the quality of the work; (2) all five social network measures had a positive and strong correlation with the grade for volume of work and with the final graThe authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, through the Grants "Projeto Estrategico-UI 252-2011-2012'' reference PEst-OE/EME/UI0252/2011, "Ph.D. Scholarship Grant'' reference SFRH/BD/85672/2012, and the support of Parallel Planes Lda.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Challenges in identifying barriers to adoption in a theory-based implementation study: lessons for future implementation studies

Background: Exploring barriers to the uptake of research based recommendations into practice is an important part of the development of implementation programmes. Techniques to identify barriers can include use of theory-informed questionnaires and qualitative interviews. Conceptualising and measuring theory-informed factors, and engaging health professionals’ to uncover all potential barriers, can be a difficult task. This paper presents a case study of the process of trying to identify, systematically, the key factors influencing health professionals’ referrals for women diagnosed with mild to moderate postnatal depression for psychological treatment. The paper illustrates how the factors were conceptualised and measured and explores the real world challenges experienced, with implications for future implementation studies. Methods: Theory-informed factors were conceptualised and measured using a questionnaire and interviews. The questionnaire was piloted, before being administered to general practitioners, practice nurses and health visitors working in general practices in one area of the UK NHS. The interviews were conducted with a small sample of general practitioners who had not completed the questionnaire, further exploring factors influencing their referral decisions in the local context. Results: The response rate to the questionnaire was low (19%), despite selecting the recommendation to target through engagement with local stakeholders and surveying local health professionals, and despite using two reminders, an incentive prize, and phone calls to practice managers to bolster response rates. Conclusions: Two significant challenges to achieving higher response rates and successfully exploring local context were identified: the difficulties of developing a robust- but feasible- questionnaire to explore theory-informed factors, and targeting recommendations that are important to policy makers, but which health professionals view as unimportant. This case study highlights the “trade-off” between scientifically rigorous collection of data against the pragmatism and flexibility requirements of “real world” implementation. Future implementation studies should explore different ways of identifying factors influencing the adoption of recommendations to bridge this gulf