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This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents our learnings of the process to perform a Master of Science class with eduScrum integrating real world problems as projects. We prepared, performed, and evaluated an agile educational concept for the new Master of Science program Digital Transformation organized and provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts - Hochschule Hannover in Germany. The course deals with innovative methodologies of agile project management and is attended by 25 students. We performed the class due the summer term in 2019 and 2020 as a teaching pair. The eduScrum method has been used in different educational contexts, including higher education. During the approach preparation, we decided to use challenges, problems, or questions from the industry. Thus, we acquired four companies and prepared in coordination with them dedicated project descriptions. Each project description was refined in the form of a backlog (list of requirements). We divided the class into four eduScrum teams, one team for each project. The subdivision of the class was done randomly.
Since we wanted to integrate realistic projects into industry partners’ implementation, we decided to adapt the eduScrum approach. The eduScrum teams were challenged with different projects, e.g., analyzing a dedicated phenomenon in a real project or creating a theoretical model for a company’s new project management approach. We present our experiences of the whole process to prepare, perform and evaluate an agile educational approach combined with projects from practice. We found, that the students value the agile method using real world problems. However, the results are mainly based on the summer term 2019, this paper also includes our learnings from virtual distance teaching during the Covid 19 pandemic in summer term 2020. The paper contributes to the distribution of methods for higher education teaching in the classroom and distance learning.
Agile methods require constant optimization of one’s approach and leading to the adaptation of agile practices. These practices are also adapted when introducing them to companies and their software development teams due to organizational constraints. As a consequence of the widespread use of agile methods, we notice a high variety of their elements:
Practices, roles, and artifacts. This multitude of agile practices, artifacts, and roles results in an unsystematic mixture. It leads to several questions: When is a practice a practice, and when is it a method or technique? This paper presents the tree of agile elements, a taxonomy of agile methods, based on the literature and guidelines of widely used agile methods. We describe a taxonomy of agile methods using terms and concepts of software engineering, in particular software process models. We aim to enable agile elements to be delimited, which should help companies, agile teams, and the research community gain a basic understanding of the interrelationships and dependencies of individual components of agile methods.
Context: Companies adapt agile methods, practices or artifacts for their use in practice since more than two decades. This adaptions result in a wide variety of described agile practices. For instance, the Agile Alliance lists 75 different practices in its Agile Glossary. This situation may lead to misunderstandings, as agile practices with similar names can be interpreted and used differently.
Objective: This paper synthesize an integrated list of agile practices, both from primary and secondary sources.
Method: We performed a tertiary study to identify existing overviews and lists of agile practices in the literature. We identified 876 studies, of which 37 were included.
Results: The results of our paper show that certain agile practices are listed and used more often in existing studies. Our integrated list of agile practices comprises 38 entries structured in five categories. Conclusion: The high number of agile practices and thus, the wide variety increased steadily over the past decades due to the adaption of agile methods. Based on our findings, we present a comprehensive overview of agile practices. The research community benefits from our integrated list of agile practices as a potential basis for future research. Also, practitioners benefit from our findings, as the structured overview of agile practices provides the opportunity to select or adapt practices for their specific needs.
Pathologists need to identify abnormal changes in tissue. With the developing digitalization, the used tissue slides are stored digitally. This enables pathologists to annotate the region of interest with the support of software tools. PathoLearn is a web-based learning platform explicitly developed for the teacher-student scenario, where the goal is that students learn to identify potential abnormal changes. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become very important in medicine. Many health sectors already utilize AI and ML. This will only increase in the future, also in the field of pathology. Therefore, it is important to teach students the fundamentals and concepts of AI and ML early in their studies. Additionally, creating and training AI generally requires knowledge of programming and technical details. This thesis evaluates how this boundary can be overcome by comparing existing end-to-end AI platforms and teaching tools for AI. It was shown that a visual programming editor offers a fitting abstraction for creating neural networks without programming. This was extended with real-time collaboration to enable students to work in groups. Additionally, an automatic training feature was implemented, removing the necessity to know technical details about training neural networks.
Antimicrobials are widely used to cure intramammary infections (IMI) in dairy cows during the dry period (DP). Nevertheless, the IMI cure is influenced by many factors and not all quarters benefit from antimicrobial dry cow treatment (DCT). To evaluate the true effect of antibiotic DCT compared to self-cure and the role of causative pathogens on the IMI cure, a retrospective cross-sectional study was performed. The analysis included 2987 quarters infected at dry-off (DO). Information on DCT, causative pathogens, somatic cell count, milk yield, amount of lactation, Body Condition Score, and season and year of DO were combined into categorical variables. A generalized linear mixed model with a random cow, farm and year effect and the binary outcome of bacteriological cure of IMI during the DP was conducted. In the final model, a significant effect (p < 0.05) on DP cure was seen for the DO season and the category of causative pathogens (categories being: Staphylococcus aureus, non-aureus staphylococci, streptococci, coliforms, ‘other Gram-negative bacteria’, ‘other Gram positive bacteria’, non-bacterial infections and mixed infections), while antibiotic DCT (vs. non-antibiotic DCT) only showed a significant effect in combination with the pathogen categories streptococci and ‘other Gram-positive bacteria’.
Background
In Germany, up to 50% of nursing home residents are admitted to a hospital at least once a year. It is often unclear whether this is beneficial or even harmful. Successful interprofessional collaboration and communication involving general practitioners (GPs) and nurses may improve medical care of nursing home residents. In the previous interprof study, the six-component intervention package interprof ACT was developed to facilitate collaboration of GPs and nurses in nursing homes. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the interprof ACT intervention.
Methods
This multicentre, cluster randomised controlled trial compares nursing homes receiving the interprof ACT intervention package for a duration of 12 months (e.g. comprising appointment of mutual contact persons, shared goal setting, standardised GPs’ home visits) with a control group (care as usual). A total of 34 nursing homes are randomised, and overall 680 residents recruited. The intervention package is presented in a kick-off meeting to GPs, nurses, residents/relatives or their representatives. Nursing home nurses act as change agents to support local adaption and implementation of the intervention measures. Primary outcome is the cumulative incidence of hospitalisation within 12 months. Secondary outcomes include admissions to hospital, days admitted to hospital, use of other medical services, prevalence of potentially inappropriate medication and quality of life. Additionally, health economic and a mixed methods process evaluation will be performed.
Discussion
This study investigates a complex intervention tailored to local needs of nursing homes. Outcomes reflect the healthcare and health of nursing home residents, as well as the feasibility of the intervention package and its impact on interprofessional communication and collaboration. Because of its systematic development and its flexible nature, interprof ACT is expected to be viable for large-scale implementation in routine care services regardless of local organisational conditions and resources available for medical care for nursing home residents on a regular basis. Recommendations will be made for an improved organisation of primary care for nursing home residents. In addition, the results may provide important knowledge and data for the development and evaluation of further strategies to improve outpatient care for elderly care-receivers.
Background: Given both the increase of nursing home residents forecast and challenges of current interprofessional interactions, we developed and tested measures to improve collaboration and communication between nurses and general practitioners (GPs) in this setting. Our multicentre study has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FK 01GY1124).
Methods: The measures were developed iteratively in a continuous process, which is the focus of this article. In part 1 “exploration of the situation”, interviews were conducted with GPs, nurses, nursing home residents and their relatives focusing on interprofessional interactions and medical care. They were analysed qualitatively. Based on these results, in part 2 “development of measures to improve collaboration”, ideas for improvement were developed in nine focus groups with GPs and nurses. These ideas were revisited in a final expert workshop. We analysed the focus groups and expert workshop using mind mapping methods, and finally drew up the compilation of measures. In an exploratory pilot study "study part 3" four nursing homes chose the measures they wanted to adopt. These were tested for three months. Feasibility and acceptance of the measures were evaluated via guideline interviews with the stakeholders which were analysed by content analyses.
Results: Six measures were generated: meetings to establish common goals, main contact person, standardised pro re nata medication, introduction of name badges, improved availability of nurse/GP and standardised scheduling/ procedure for nursing home visits. In the pilot study, the measures were implemented in four nursing homes. GPs and nurses reviewed five measures as feasible and acceptable, only the designation of a “main contact person” was not considered as an improvement.
Conclusions: Six measures to improve collaboration and communication could be compiled in a multistep qualitative process respecting the perspectives of involved stakeholders. Five of the six measures were positively assessed in an exploratory pilot study. They could easily be transferred into the daily routine of other nursing homes, as no special models have to exist in advance. Impact of the measures on patient oriented outcomes should be examined in further research.
Trial registration: Not applicable.
Staphylococcus aureus is recognized worldwide as one of the major agents of dairy cow intra-mammary infections. This microorganism can express a wide spectrum of pathogenic factors used to attach, colonize, invade and infect the host. The present study evaluated 120 isolates from eight different countries that were genotyped by RS-PCR and investigated for 26 different virulence factors to increase the knowledge on the circulating genetic lineages among the cow population with mastitis. New genotypes were observed for South African strains while for all the other countries new variants of existing genotypes were detected. For each country, a specific genotypic pattern was found. Among the virulence factors, fmtB, cna, clfA and leucocidins genes were the most frequent. The sea and sei genes were present in seven out of eight countries; seh showed high frequency in South American countries (Brazil, Colombia, Argentina), while sel was harboured especially in one Mediterranean country (Tunisia). The etb, seb and see genes were not detected in any of the isolates, while only two isolates were MRSA (Germany and Italy) confirming the low diffusion of methicillin resistance microorganism among bovine mastitis isolates. This work demonstrated the wide variety of S. aureus genotypes found in dairy cattle worldwide. This condition suggests that considering the region of interest might help to formulate strategies for reducing the infection spreading.
Visual effects and elements in video games and interactive virtual environments can be applied to transfer (or delegate) non-visual perceptions (e.g. proprioception, presence, pain) to players and users, thus increasing perceptual diversity via the visual modality. Such elements or efects are referred to as visual delegates (VDs). Current fndings on the experiences that VDs can elicit relate to specifc VDs, not to VDs in general. Deductive and comprehensive VD evaluation frameworks are lacking. We analyzed VDs in video games to generalize VDs in terms of their visual properties. We conducted a systematic paper analysis to explore player and user experiences observed in association with specifc VDs in user studies. We conducted semi-structured interviews with expert players to determine their preferences and the impact of VD properties. The resulting VD framework (VD-frame) contributes to a more strategic approach to identifying the impact of VDs on player and user experiences.
Research into new forms of care for complex chronic diseases requires substantial efforts in the collection, storage, and analysis of medical data. Additionally, providing practical support for those who coordinate the actual care management process within a diversified network of regional service providers is also necessary. For instance, for stroke units, rehabilitation partners, ambulatory actors, as well as health insurance funds. In this paper, we propose the concept of comprehensive and practical receiver-oriented encryption (ROE) as a guiding principle for such data-intensive, research-oriented case management systems, and
illustrate our concept with the example of the IT infrastructure of the project STROKE OWL.