I have chosen to revise a course I will be teaching in the coming months, IMHA 514 Interprofessional Practice. It is one of six courses in our Interprofessional Mental Health & Addiction (IMHA) Post-Degree Diploma IMHA – Camosun College. The course requires significant upgrades due to recent changes in the IMHA Program curriculum to reflect the shifting knowledge and skill required of gradates in the field of mental health and substance use services.
Course Description
This course focuses on skills, knowledge, and values necessary for interprofessional practice in mental health & substance abuse services. Students will examine the responsibilities and obligations of the professional with emphasis on self-reflective and ethical evidence-based practice, including legislation and policies affecting the care of persons with mental health and/or substance use challenges.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of IMHA 514 learners will:
- Demonstrate responsible and ethical decision-making in interprofessional mental health and substance use environments.
- Take responsibility for decisions and actions, and evaluate the effectiveness of these in collaborative care settings.
- Articulate a philosophy of practice as an interprofessional mental health and substance use professional as it relates to the support of individuals and families.
- Use effective and appropriate advocacy skills and strategies to advocate for individual and family supports and services.
The IMHA Program is delivered in a blended model; each course includes face-to-face (f2f) content at the beginning, middle, and/or end of the course, with a majority of the content delivered asynchronously online through Camosun’s Learning Management System, Desire2Learn (D2L). When the Program was first developed in 2007, we explored course delivery options, including traditional f2f, completely online, and blended formats. We determined that a blended delivery would best match learning activities for the knowledge and skill-sets required in the field of mental health and substance use services. Our sources for guiding the development of the courses included Boettcher and Conrad’s Moving Teaching and Learning to the Web (2004).
Over the years, we have tried different ratios or f2f to D2L, sometimes without any f2f instruction in a course. Continued student and faculty formal and informal feedback has resulted in the current delivery, whereby f2f seminars provide a forum in all courses for students to develop their interpersonal skills and intervention strategies for supporting clients. The majority of students have indicated that they appreciated the f2f components to enhance their educational and community experience in the cohort. For example, they have shared that the direct in-the-moment guidance offered by faculty and peer feedback was instrumental for making adjustments to improve their application of skills.
A more recent exploration of the literature for this ETEC 510 assignment determined that blended delivery continues to be highly favored. Based on a study to determine potential factors related to student satisfaction with online courses, Beqiri, Chase, and Bishka (2009) recommended that “schools and universities lean toward a blended course-delivery mode (with some face-to-face component) versus 100% online delivery” (p. 99). Dukes, Waring, and Koorland (2006) found that “studies have demonstrated that blended instruction can positively affect numerous aspects of the academic experience . . . faculty reported greater flexibility with course development, increased contact among students and instructors, and better integration of inquiry-based instructional methods” (p. 153).
Although the majority of students in the IMHA Program have lived on Vancouver Island, we often have students join us from off-island; for example, the current cohort includes students from Port Hardy, Vancouver, the BC interior, and Calgary, AB. To help reduce travel times, we have scheduled on-campus mandatory days as intensives that cover two courses in the same week. We have also designated some face-to-face days as optional for long-distance students; they are accommodated through the use of Skype to connect to students on-campus. On occasion, we use inter-campus video streaming when we can arrange for students living near a post-secondary institute to connect to the Victoria campus.
We believe it is important to help all students feel connected in our cohort model, especially in the interprofessional practice course because we are facilitating the development of knowledge and skills to be effective in collaborative teamwork. Students come with a variety of work and educational experiences for which we want to encourage an appreciative community of learners that benefit from each other’s perspectives and engage in healthy communication as will be expected when they are graduates in the field.
This course includes two categories for graded assessment:
- D2L public discussion forums and private personal reflection postings 66%
- Student Directed Learning project and presentation to peers 34%
The discussion and personal reflection postings provide opportunity for students to not only demonstrate their conceptual skills and integration of the course content, but to be a contributing factor in each other’s learning. Anderson (2008) recognizes that this type of assessment becomes a “reflective task” and students “use their posting . . . as evidence of their understanding of content concepts and intellectual growth during the class” resulting in “quality contributions” (p. 287). The intention is to help students be responsible for their learning, which informs the final student-directed project.
The Student Directed Learning assignment is aligned with the course outcome of developing a philosophy of practice. Students will develop a rationale and supporting documents to design and develop a project that reflects their learning needs; they will share their projects during the final seminar in a context or interprofessional education. This final project is a form of summative assessment in which students incorporate aspects of the course content through a personal lens for professional development. It is criteria-based in which students receive a set of guidelines that include required elements of the project (e.g., slide presentation, educational document), and the expectation it is relevant to their own and their peers’ learning needs. This is an integral aspect of the assignment to engage students to be motivated by and respond to their self-assessed learning needs. Although the course material is important to meet all learning outcomes for the course, students at this post-degree level of diploma studies benefit more from this type of assessment than an exam, as has been previously used. As Gibbs and Simpson (2005) recognize, “students tend to gain higher marks from coursework assignments“ (p. 6) and that average marks were higher when there were no exams but only coursework. They also determined that assignment-based courses resulted in a higher quality of learning (p. 7).
In addition to graded assignments, students also complete Critical Thinking Moments to consider application of the materials to self. These are strategically placed throughout the modules for students to pause and consider the application of concepts to self as emerging workers in mental health and substance use services.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an Online Learning Context. Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Retrieved from: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008
Beqiri, M. S., Chase, N. M., & Bishka, A. (2009). Online Course Delivery: An Empirical Investigation of Factors Affecting Student Satisfaction, Journal of Education for Business, 85: 95–100. Doi: 10.1080/08832320903258527
Boettcher, J. V., & Conrad, R. (2004). Faculty Guide for Moving Teaching and Learning to the Web (2nd ed.). Phoenix: League for Innovation in the community College.
Dukes III, L. L., Waring, S. M., Koorland, M. (2006). A The Blended Course Delivery Method: The Not-So-Distant Education. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, 22(4) 153-158.
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf