another wee quiz

After the astounding popularity of may last quiz I have decided to give you the opportunity to try another one. let me know how you get on. I have to link you to the quiz here as I cannot embed it.
So here you are. You have to match the term with the description. Click on the hand to start. This one is about legislation covering midwifery practice. In particular it is about the legislation which has requirements around how and what midwives document. some terms are abbreviated to fit the window. This is part of a learning package I am developing just now.

Stages of labour quiz

Orgasmic birth

This is another, longer video, on the same topic as last video.
As a midwife I know that this type of birth is very real. What prevents women from experiencing birth in this way is mainly to do with fear and interventions that are imposed on them. Of course a few women will have problems associated with pregnancy and birth and this is why it is important to have skilled birth attendant, a midwife, who knows when to stand back and let things happen and when it is important to step in and intervene or to seek specialist assistance. However at least 85% of women should be able to birth in this way if only they trust themselves and their ability to do this and have care givers who believe in them.

Letting the fear go around birth

This is an intro for a TV series but the best youtube video of birth that I have seen so far. In 3 mins it manages to say so much. What do you think?
It is all about acknowledging and letting fear go while allowing women to do what they need to do in order to birth their babies.

7 More Things You Don't Need to Know About Me ( and probably don't care)

I have been tagged by Sarah Stewart to write about things most people don't know about me. Not sure anyone will really be that interested and I will make this very brief.

1) I was a child model. I was one of three little Gemmell sisters and our parents were good friends of the Pearson's who owned a clothes shop in Friars Vennel in Dumfries. My oldest sister was 5 years older than me, my middle sister three years older so we were ideal ages apart for modeling children's wear. We used to be taken around all the local village halls for fashion shows. The problem was that I got dreadfully car sick at the time. I remember one show where I got an extra round of applause for bravely going on when I had vomited a about twelve times on the trip there, I got another round of applause for being the only one who would model a swim suit.

2) My Dad was a church organist and my mother was a concert violinist. I spent a lot of my childhood hanging out in orchestra pits. I particularly loved the big Timpani. My dad was also the musical director for our local Christmas pantomime and my sisters and I got to star in small roles in several of these. It was through this that I first learned Pythagoras's theorem, the square of the hypotenuse etc. I amazed my teachers with this.

3) I lived in Holland (Amsterdam) for a year and a half in the mid 1970s, when I was early to mid 20s. It was a great experience and just a wee bit wild. My friend and I worked nights at the Academisch Ziekenhuis and learned to speak a little dutch. We suspected our neighbours thought we had some other type of night work!

4) When I lived in Amsterdam I learned to sail. I loved sailing up and down the canals and going for pub crawls by boat. Mooring was a bit tricky at the end of these expeditions. My knowledge of sailing language is all Dutch eg "Klaar om te wended" (The English term is "ready about" I think)

5) I left school at 15 years of age with 4 Scottish O'Levels (GCSE equivalent) under my belt. At that time you only needed 3 O Levels to do Registered Nursing. I did some nursing courses following this RGN and SCM but did not enter tertiary education until 1994 when I enrolled in a Bachelors Degree for Registered Midwives. I now have a Masters Degree. I discovered I really like formal study and education.

6) I hate housework but love a tidy house. How do you balance these polarities? Answer: with great difficulty. Same can be said for gardens and gardening, I guess I am just lazy.

7) My most favourite city in the world is Florence. I went there only once when I lived in Holland and I just loved it. I loved the architecture, the art, the landscape, the people and the food. I am a bit scared to go back though just in case the memory and reality do not match.

Sorry folks but I am not tagging anyone as all the people I would tag have been tagged already.

Round up of developing a midwifery practice skills course for flexible delivery.

Image: Pohutakawa, the NZ Christmas tree. from Andy Eakin’s photos on Flickr.com


As the year comes to a close Lorna and I have been making great progress towards the midwifery practice skills course we are developing in a blended delivery format. I have not been blogging much because I have been so busy working on this but I now need to record what I have been up to for the last few weeks. So to bring you up to speed on what this is all about here is a brief outline of the programme.

Background

We have been developing a midwifery program to be delivered in a blended format over the last couple of years. We start at the beginning of 2009. Students will be located in groups or cohorts in various rural towns as well as the main centers. Otago Polytechnic are developing this in collaboration with Christchurch polytechnic. The process we have developed is as follows

We are using the moodle LMS for the online course delivery. All content is being developed in modular format using EXE as a development tool. We are using a mix of written material, links to online content and free online resources. We are also using powerpoints with voice over, converted into shockwave flash files with ispring and either embedded or hyperlinked to exe files. Students are given a plan for progress through these modules although they can also work at their own pace if they wish. It is expected that they will progress through this material ready to attend the face to face components ready to discuss and debate the theory they are learning and to gain experience with the practical skills they will need for midwifery practice.There are formative assessments, such as quizzes and interactive games, to support learning in the online resources. Each section has clear learning outcomes to help students understand what they are expected to learn from the resources.

Students will meet in their local groups once a week with a local midwife/educator who will facilitate their discussion, direct them to learning support services if they are having difficulty with the learning and provide teaching and guidance with selected midwifery practice skills. The facilitator will also encourage the students to share and support each other through their learning experience and will coordinate placements in the various clinical or midwifery practice areas, liaising with midwives and other health care providers.

In addition the entire class will come together at four two week blocks in the year. At the start of the year they will be introduced to each other, the courses, the technology and support services they can access. Some face to face teaching and team building and group activities will be scheduled. Later their will be more face to face teaching and at the final two week block examinations and summative assessments will take place. In addition to this teaching and learning students will have midwifery practice placements in a variety of settings.

Progressing to this point

As we approach the start of this new programme. I am feeling very positive about it. We have been working very hard to structure our course in a logical way which should clearly link theory and practice and progress the students through from the basics to to more complex practice skills, while keeping these firmly linked to the context of midwifery practice.

As I have recorded in previous posts we separated the skills into modules which made sense in terms of midwifery practice. These are, antenatal, labour and birth, postnatal mother and child and therpeutics. More recently we realised we needed another module for the core component which overrides all of these others, that is communication. In this fifth module we will have material on communication skills and also include material on documentation, which is another form of communication. We were going to put material about the components from this course which will fit into the student developing portfolio, either paper based or electronic. However at the moment we feel that we will keep this alongside the course information, which is where the students will enter the course.

I have been working on the EXE files, which are on my hard drive, developign the course content. I then felt I needed a better overview of how the students would actually move through the course material. Which aspects would be taught face to face in the intensives. Which would be taught face to face in the tutorial groups and which would be principally online learning. I sat down and worked out where all these components would fit within the year of the course. At this point we hit a small block as we were not all thinking along the same lines here. My boss, head of the school of midwifery and head of the health group at Otago Polytechnic, Sally Pairman, obviously liked the way I had shaped this up and developed this further alongside all of the other courses the first year students will be involved in.

Earlier this week I flew up to Christchurch and had a meeting with Lorna. This was very positive. Lorna and I share very similar ideas about how the course will work and so we have very few problems in working alongside each other. It was lovely to spend some time with her and her family, she gave me a bed for the night. We have negotiated with the math department from CPIT to run the examination of Math for our students and to take a couple of tutorial sessions with them as well. This is fantastic and will definitely be a bonus for us.

So now the road ahead is very clear, there is still some development needing to be done with the online resources but I am feeling confident and positive about the programme.

What have been the highs a lows of the development process.

Highs

I have been very lucky to be working alongside Lorna in CPIT. It has been great that we agree so well on so much. Lorna identified EXE which has been a godsend for course development and also ispring which has been great for converting power point to shockwave flash files.

I am sooo… glad I participated in the Facilitating online learning communities course with Leigh Blackall and Bronwyn Hegarty and also the Design for Flexible Learning also with Leigh and Bronwyn. I would not be nearly so able to engage with this process without the learning I did in these courses.

Finding all the great stuff that is out there on the internet, free for anyone to use has been just amazing. The generosity of those who have developed these resources is amazing. I wish we were able to reciprocate, perhaps in time??

Lows

The main point of difference is with our institutions and the way that they perceive students should engage with learning. OP has an open policy where we as lecturers own the material we develop, we can take it with us when we go as long as we acknowledge OP if we use it. We can make it freely available on the internet if we wish to. CPIT on the other hand have a closed policy, all of their resources belong to CPIT and cannot be shared in an open environment. None the less I have loaded some of the content I have developed onto wikieducator and slide share etc, and I hope to do more development of this as time permits.

The time frame has been tight, the pressure has been quite enormous, and the workload allocation for development in no way related to the reality of the job. It has also been a struggle to do this and keep our existing students ontrack. I have to say our first year students this year have been a group of wonderful women and have been enthusiastic is supporting us as we have worked to develop the new course materials. Some of this new work has also filtered through to them to their benefit also I think.

A times I have felt quite alone and isolated. It is hard to get the IT support needed as we are experts in midwifery and so we really have to develop things ourselves. I do think the IT support has been less than it could have been at times however.

Conclusion

So now I am on leave for abpout 3 weeks. I am going to have a total rest from this and back into it on January 5th.

Merry Christmas ( or happy celebration of whatever you celebrate at this time of year). Happy holidays to all.
This post is also on my other blog Fled: Flexible learning education design. All hyperlinks are included there.

Lactation conference online: Gold 09

As part of my role as a midwife working in a rural maternity unit I have been enrolled in a lactation course. I have only just enrolled and have not traveled very far with the course yet, however there are a couple of things I want to comment on at the moment.

The course has been developed by a group called Health E learning and has been developed on the Moodle platform. This interests me as we are developing our new midwifery programme through Moodle. The course looks professional and engaging and may have some ideas which I can incorporate into the work I am doing.

Health E learning seem to be a commercial group who are engaged with producing learning resources for lactation consultants. These courses are available for a fee. I realise that there is a cost in developing these resources, however it does seem a shame that only those who can afford to pay will have access to them. In my case my employer is paying.

The Health e learning group are running an online conference (Gold 09)which can be attended, once again for a fee. As they say, the cost will be significantly cheaper than actually flying overseas and attending a conference. I am very interested to see how this goes and to find out how the networking opportunities compare with face to face opportunities at a conference.

It is exciting to see that rural health groups are taking advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by the internet. This is the third year that the Gold conference has been run but it is the first time I have heard of it. I think this is a great initiative and hope that all midwives have an opportunity to attend, supported by there employers, not only with the fees but also with time off for the conference.

I will let you know how i go with the course as I work through it.

Image: woman breast feeding baby, from hdptcar's photos on flickr.com