Thissection will discuss the opportunities and challengesidentified in thecase withrespect to issues thatmatter for the qualityofeducationalpracticesat the courselevel (see also Chap-ter 1). Three themes willbe highlighted: theformsofcurricularcoherence that characterise the courseorganisation; the opportunities the activities give for integrating different forms of knowledge; and thewaystudent engagement is enhanced and supported through group-based assignments.
4.5.1 Coherence and principles for course organisation
The previous sections showed that the students by and largeappreciated the learning activi-ties and pedagogicalapproaches used in the course, and that they also shared the overall vi-sion of the programme and course as aiming to develop a ‘pracademic’ competence. This came, for instance, intoview in how the students described the learning potentialofthe home exam as related to the opportunity to reflect on and employ perspectives from the course literature in their exam. The ideal of a ‘pracademic practice’ runs as the pedagogical vision for the course, and servesas a joint frame for the teacher and the students aswellas for seeing connections between this particularcourse and the programme as a whole. The students seemed to recognise ways of working across the courses, and to be familiar with the intended
learning outcomes. Within thisframe of thinking, we will characterise the courseas assign-ment-driven in the sense that the lectures and the assignments followthe same progression over the courseperiod and in the waythat the assignments build on each other and build up to the final exam. For instance, students were asked to writeafictitious application for a job, which laterwas used as a basis for the role play of job interviews. Thegroup assignments also resembled each otherin their format, in the sense that the students responded to or enacted a practical situation and then wrote a report inwhich their reflections on and advice on the situationwas to be grounded in theoretical knowledge and concepts from the course litera-ture. Wecan say that the course is constructively aligned (Biggs and Tang, 2011) in theway the assignments and coursecontent are related to the pedagogicalvisions andintended learn-ing outcomes. Moreover, ways of engaging students in learning activitiesform a principleof contextual coherence in the course, and contribute to create a sense of continuity for the stu-dents when entering a knowledgedomain that is not clearly structured by theoretical con-cepts(Muller, 2009)–see also the discussion aboutcoherence principlesin chapter 1 inthis report. At the same time, there is a certain gap between the course activitiesand the final assessment. The final mark isbased on the home exam only; the threeassignments (written by the group)just had tobepassed. As a consequence, the group assignments had the function of training exercises that stimulated the students to relatetheoretical knowledge to practical situations, but the knowledge and understanding achieved intheseexercises did not count in the final grading as such.
The different courses within the programme are conceptualised by the students aslinked well together, and apparently it is alsoeasy for them to see how the different courses are linked. Inthe specific course on basic personnel management the teacher explicitly encour-aged the students to use relevant elements from othercourses in the assignments. Another sign of integrationacross courses is that the students, in the final interview, sometimes strug-gled with separating the different courses from one another when we asked particularly about their experiences withthecourse in basic human resource management. However, when it comes to feedback on the assignments we can see a discrepancy between teacher’s intentions and students’ experience. While the teacher stated that she carefully gives feedback to all groups, thestudents’ experiencevaried from groups that found the teacher feedback veryuseful to groups that could not remember having any feedback from the teacher atall. As mentioned earlier, this might alsobe related to whether and howthe students have ac-cessed and workedwiththe feedback. Several studiesinothercontexts haverevealedthat this matter significantly for howfeedback isexperienced and that it mightvaryacross student groups (Evans, 2013). Nevertheless, the variationfound in thisparticularcourseindicates that students’ furtherwork on the feedback they received wasleft more to the students’ vol-untary initiative, rather than forming a key element of the organised course activities.
4.5.2 Opportunities and challenges for knowledge integration
Integrating theoretical and practical forms of knowledge was a key to the teachers’ pedagog-ical vision in the course as well asinthe wider study programme inOrganisation and Man-agement. The courseactivitiesoverallseemed to support this integration. Inparticular, the
waythelecturer applies practical examples and illustrationfromreal-life professional con-texts, helped the students to see the relevance of the theory. However, the relationship be-tween theory and practiceappears to us assomewhatblurred. When students used the con-cept of ‘theory’ they referred to everything that waswritten intheir textbook,which included theoretical concepts as well as practical examples, empiricalmaterial and discussions. In other words, the concept of theory covers a lot, and seems to relate to everything that is con-veyed in a written format by authors external to the course. On the other hand, the term ‘prac-tice’ is also used about a range of elements, like the practicalillustrations given by the teacher inlectures, discussions and group assignments; allthat is conceived asrelevant knowledge by the students. Thus the concepts of ‘theory’ on the one hand and ‘practice’ on the otherseem to overlap. This mightin part be explained by the character of theknowledge domain ofHRM, which,asalso stated by the courseteacher, has only recently been subjected to theoretical developments. Itmight also beexplained bythepurposeof the learning activities, which will varyaccording to theknowledge challenges they entail (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2016). In this case a mainpurposewas to introduce students to practical personnel work and provide them with conceptual resources needed to reflect on and justify choices in applied HRM.
Looking further into the activities of caseassignments and role play, we notice that these were experienced asproductive learningactivitiesbythestudents. The activity that stood out asparticularly stimulating for student learning was the role play they enacted when solving assignment number three. This can be explained as an example of an opportunity for the stu-dents to activate their varied experiences from (part time) jobs. However, our analysis indi-cates that several students sawthisprimarilyas relevant for themselvesas applicants for possible jobs(now or later), rather than asfuturepersonnelmanagers. As mentioned above, taking on the role of the job applicant seemed to generatesubstantially more anxiety than that of the interviewer. A challengeinthis regard might be that teachers and students operate with different basic assumptions about ‘relevance’. While the teacher might take it for granted that this exercise is relevant for the students asfuturepersonnelmanagers and recruiters in organisational life, the students seemed to think ofit as more relevant for their lives here and now. This points to a more generalchallenge inhoweducational content can be maderelevant for learners in different life phases, and to what the ideal of creating ‘authentic contexts’ (Keys
& Wolfe 1990; Knoll 1997; Rule, 2006) might mean in different knowledgedomains. More specifically, it raises the fundamental question of howlearning activitiescan emphasise expe-rience-based knowledge while atthesame time preparing students for future positions they are not yet designated to take.
Our analysis indicates that the teacher plays an important role in students’ integration of different types of knowledge. A more thorough analysis of this issue would require more data and in-depth investigations of teacher-student interactions in the course contexts. Insum, however, the different activities in the courseseem to complement each other also when it comes to opportunities for knowledge integration. In the lectures, the textbook and th eoreti-cal concepts provided the basis for practical illustrations, while the group assignments worked the otherway round and asked students to use practicalscenarios as a basis for the-oretical reflections. Inthis waythere was a productive relationship between the activities. However, the fact that only around 50% of the students actually followed the lectures raises
a question about the importance of theselectures for the cohort as a whole. Clarifying what counts asthetheoretical grounds andconceptual resources for human resourcemanagement, and supporting students in actively using conceptual resources in their reflections, therefore comes forward as an educational challenge.
4.5.3 Engaging and supporting students in group processes
As mentioned in the introductory chapter to this report, student-centred approaches assume the active role of students inlearning processes, which involves participation inknowledge construction and active exploration by them. Peer discussions and interaction withpeers played a prominent role in this course, by way of the assignment-driven course design which to a great extent was organised as group work.
The students in thiscoursehadextensive experiencewith group work fromtheir firstyear in the programme, which was an important basis for their course participation. The students seemed to appreciate the high level of collaboration in the course and presented rich argu-ments for why collaborationenhances learning. Thefact that thestudents could decide the group constellations themselveswas also highly appreciated by thestudents. This wasrelated to the opportunity to work with people they knew and who had the same level of ambition for their achievements. However, insome cases a fewparticipants seemed to do most ofthe work, andwecould also see examples ofgroups spending theirtimewithotherstuff thanthey were supposed to do in the planned slots of time. The video recordings of group processes also demonstrated that there were tendencies to conflicts anddisagreement insome of the groups. Such conflictswere linked to division of labour, and to the fact that not everyone took the same responsibility for the work to be done bythe group. Hence, a challengewith this type of learning activitiesis to ensure that everyonecontributes so that itbecomes a truly collective endeavour. Creating assignments and monitoring students’ work in such a way that students are guided toactivate deepapproaches to learning is this equally important, ifnot even more, when using group-based activities (cf.Parpala et al., 2010). Thismight befurther enhanced by the teacher explaining the work procedures also for the social regulation ofthe group process, in addition to the knowledge-related work.
A challengewith theseactivities, andwith thecoursedesign moregenerally, is also that it is quite time-demanding and vulnerable with respect to the staffing and engagement of teacher support. Pedagogical approachesas case assignments and role play require good planning and organisation from the teacher side (Baeten et al., 2014; Martinet al., 2014), and following up students intheir group processes is a time-demanding endeavour. The workload inthis casewas characterisedas‘absolutely extreme’ by the teacher, who alsowas responsi-ble forseveral othercourses inthe same period. This pointsto an overallchallenge of not seeing teachers’ work or the different activities in isolation, but keeping the whole work pro-cess for bothteachers and students inmind whendesigning student-centred learning activi-ties and environments.
4.6 Conclusion and recommendations
This case study set out to examine how the interplay of caseanalyses, role play and written assignments worked to link theoretical and experience-based forms of knowledge in an Or-ganisation and Management coursefocusing on HRM practices. The students inthis course had been organised in working groups also during the firstyearoftheir BA programme, and they thushadextensiveexperiencefrom how toorganise group processes. This waspartly a result of their own experiences and partly a result of howstructures and strategies for suc-cessfulgroup workhadbeen explicitly taught by theteachers in the introductorypart of the programme. These experiences were important for the students’ self-organising of working groups in line with their academic ambitions.
Most study activities within thecourseappeared asopportunitiesfor the students to acti-vate their experience-based knowledge. Whilstthis is found important for learning, it may at the same time generate differences between the students’ participation opportunities (Bransford et al., 2005). It is particularly interesting inthis case to see howgroup work with assignments is organised inways which imply that having work experience may be an ad-vantage. It is also interesting to note the openness in therole play astowhatkindof experi-ences the students could gain and whatthesewere related to (e.g. seeing themselvesas pro-spective job seekers, or as HR managers responsible for recruiting processes in work organi-sation).
Constructivealignment ofthe courseelements was by and largeachieved by this structure.
However, there are reasons to askwhether suchalignment canbe fullyachievedif the stu-dents do not see how the different assignments build up to the final exam. Thethree group assignments inthis casewere compulsory but they did not count in the final assessment of the course. Togetherwith the lack of clear rules for the social organisation of the process, this might explain some of the discrepancies we found in the group collaborationand in the per-ceived feedback from the teacher on the group assignments. Based on these insights, we pro-vide the following recommendations for courses that employ related pedagogical approaches and learning activities:
• Takestudents’ previous experiences with group workinto account when designing group assignments and their related pedagogical support
• Consider how students engagement and achievements in the learning process can have implications for the final grading in thecourse
• Consider what previous experience and knowledge students have in the given knowledge domain, to align notions of relevance and purpose of the learning activities
• Consider the resources used on lectures and teacher-ledactivitiesin the courseas a whole, if these are not mandatory and followed by a majority of the students
Yngve Nordkvelle & Odd Rune Stalheim
This chapter:
• Investigates how the use of simulation in nursing education affects students learning.
• Discusses opportunities and challenges related to the use of simulation activities in practice and how students are engaged in learning activities.
• Provides recommendations for how to handle and use high technological simulation as part of students’ practicum.
5.1 Introduction
This case explores the use of simulationin nursing education. It highlights how students pre-pare for andexperience the acting outofthesimulationsituation. Theemotional,cognitive and professional development as a result of exploring the paths and shortcuts between the domainoftheory and practice through simulationtechnology is an exciting and innovative developmentinnursing education, a type of innovative practice that has shown merit over the last decades (see below). Thequestion is, does it improve the qualityof learning and teaching?
Nursing education is a complex professionaleducation with strict rules andrestrictions for the setup of courses. The ministry has decided that Norwegian nursing educationinstitutions will followthe National regulation of nursing education from 2008 aswell astheNational QualificationsFramework (NQF) (of2013) for local curricula, adhering to a common Euro-pean framework. The two have different legal status, and, as most higher institutions, the ad-ministration has strived to revise the texts to complywithwhatisinterpretedas viable con-sequences of what the framework impliesnationally(Prøitz, Havnes, Briggs and Scott, 2017).
The division between theoretical and practicalteaching is 50% toeach, and the design of
The division between theoretical and practicalteaching is 50% toeach, and the design of