Guest Blog from Jennifer Smith
Licensed practical nurses (LPNs) play some of the most vital roles in our healthcare system today. They are responsible for a wide range of patient care, including dressing wounds, giving injections, monitoring temperature and heart rate, and gathering patient information. Some LPNs are even responsible for performing laboratory test and assisting in an infant’s delivery. While most LPNs work in hospitals and other major healthcare centers, many are also employed in nursing homes, doctor’s offices, and home care capacities.
According to estimates compiled by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 728,670 people employed in the country as licensed practical nurses. While this number may sound high, the Bureau of Labor predicts a significant demand for LPNs in the medium-term future. This prediction fits well with other estimates that highlight the country’s shortfall of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare practitioners. The United States has a growing yet aging population and an educational system that makes a healthcare career difficult for many people to pursue. The end result is that nursing jobs stand to remain in high demand for some time.
In light of this, many people are going back to school and taking accredited online lpn programs in order to become a licensed practical nurse. While LPN programs are certainly offered at traditional colleges and vocational schools, the online route is particularly appealing for those who have family obligations, financial constraints, and jobs that they don’t want to quit. Their decision is further strengthened by the quality of online nursing degrees; over the past several years, the top providers of an online nursing education have invested in strengthening and diversifying their options. Top school such as Kaplan University, Jacksonville University, South University, and the University of Phoenix now offer degrees that are fully online, that can equip students with a wide range of specialized opportunities and resources, and that are taught by skilled practitioners in the field. LPN courses at these schools routinely fill up quickly as a result.
If you’re considering becoming an LPN, how can you determine whether an online program is right for you? How can you decide whether a traditional or an online course makes more sense for your current needs as well as your career goals?
To answer these questions, let’s take a look at some of the pitfalls and advantages of taking an accredited online LPN program:
Pitfalls of Online LPN Programs:
- There will be little to no hands-on clinical training
- Students and instructors don’t have the benefit of face-to-face interactions
- A lack of classroom collaboration may leave students less prepared for the team environment in which most LPNs work
- While setting your own study schedule has its advantages, being able to go through the program at your own pace may be problematic for students who are lacking in self-discipline
Advantages of Online LPN Programs:
-The curriculum in an online LPN program is almost identical to that of a traditional program
-Students can set their own pace for assignments and exams, making the course a less stressful experience
-The ability to work from home and on their own time affords students the ability to maintain jobs and family obligations
-Students save money by paying less in tuition and by forgoing the cost of expensive textbooks
-Presentation and lecture materials are usually well-organized, virtually available, and easily accessible
-Online learning can lead to faster rates of comprehension, according to a study from Carnegie Mellon University
-Online universities often have better reputations and excellence standards than the average community college
These are the main pitfalls and advantages to keep in mind when considering an online LPN degree. Ultimately, the decision should be based upon your unique circumstances and goals. If you feel as though you can handle the lack of a physical learning experience, the flexibility, availability, and affordability of an online course are certainly hard to match.
Guest Blogger
Derek Singleton, ERP Market Analyst
These days, activity streams seem to be popping up everywhere in enterprise tech as vendors rush to add social features to their software. Twitter and Facebook-like streams are even starting to gain traction in manufacturing software. Two of the most prominent examples of vendors incorporating activity stream data into their manufacturing user interface (UI) are cloud enterprise resource planning vendors: Kenandy and NetSuite.
Incorporating activity stream data into manufacturing software UIs has important implications for collaboration manufacturing environments. For instance, it enables rapid information sharing between sales teams and production teams to provide instant updates on things like purchase orders. However, I think the impact that activity streams can have on manufacturing software UIs is potentially much more interesting. Activity streams represent a radically new take on ERP Uis and have the potential to change the way users interact with their systems.
Activity Streams Create More Social Manufacturing UIs
One of the things I find interesting about activity streams in manufacturing software is that it alters the dynamic of how users interact with their software. Historically, manufacturing software has been a place where transactional information is simply input and calculations are run. For example, the bill of materials had to be entered and stored so that the material requirements planning application could run and produce reports.
While this is still largely the function of all manufacturing software, activity streams add a twist to the mix. They allow employees and supervisors to share analysis on the reports that are generated and the transactional information that’s input into the MRP ERP system. This offers users an opportunity to look at data and create an interactive conversation about what the data means and what action should given the results. It’s a more human way of interacting with ERP.
Three Further Innovations Activity Streams Can Spur
Beyond allowing users to enrich transactional data, I think that activity streams carry three other important implications for manufacturing software UIs. If incorporated, these features could help to further improve the way that manufacturers operate their shop floors. Activity streams could be use to:
1. Automate reminders that keep projects flowing. A key benefit of an activity stream is that it automatically updates subscribed users with the latest action taken. An activity stream could be used to update every employee on their current and future tasks, directly from the system. This would keep projects flowing while enabling employees to plan ahead for future projects.
2. Stream educational reminders along with tasks. Activity streams allow employees to engage in a virtual conversation about a particular topic. Through these conversations, employees inevitably share educational information. Manufacturing UIs should aggregate this information and attach the bits of wisdom to tasks that employees routinely have to perform. While many systems have wikis built into their software, a stream with this information attached proactively delivers the right information at the right time to the right individuals.
3. Aggregate the most pressing tasks for immediate action. A final benefit I see in activity streams is that it keeps employees abreast of the highest-priority action items. Manufacturing UIs could create an automatically generated list of the most important tasks to accomplish on the shop floor. For instance, an order may need to be completed and rushed to an important client prior to starting on a new purchase order. A manufacturing UI that can order tasks by importance would help manufacturers become more efficient.
This article is adapted from an article that originally appeared on Software Advice – a resource for manufacturing software. You can find the original article at: The Benefits of Activity Streams in Manufacturing UIs.
Introduction
This is a summary of one of the breakout session I ran at the Cisco Public Services Summit, Oslo 9-11 December 2011. It describes the role of Communities of Practice in supporting more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing between organisations working in the public sector. It notes the key lessons learnt from a 6-year journey, starting from the launch of the UK local government CoP platform in 2006 and how this led to an ambitious attempt to create a new kind of platform for online collaboration and data sharing – the Knowledge Hub. The slides are embedded at the foot of this post, and also available at Slideshare.
Project Purpose
The main purpose of the project was to break down some of the silo’d work practices both within councils and across the public sector. Local councils were delivering the same set of services, but were not learning from each other about good/best practice. This was also the first time that communities of practice had been used within the public sector environment as a process and methodology for encouraging knowledge sharing and personal development.
I’ve made clear in the slides the difference between “Communities of Practice” (CoPs) and “Social Networks”. Put simply, CoPs operate from a sense of shared values and objectives. Social Networks support a far more personalised agenda, or in other words, its “we” as opposed to “me”.
The following points correspond to the slide presentation, and as noted previously, represent the lessons learnt from a 6-year journey.
Communities of Practice – Lessons Learnt
1. Don’t expect everyone to join in.
Command and control structures are alive and well, particularly in public sector organisations. Joining a CoP where status and rank mean nothing, and where the free-flow of knowledge is encouraged can be a bit of a culture shock for some people. By all means encourage colleagues and managers to join, but accept that collaboration and knowledge sharing doesn’t come easy to some people. Concentrate efforts instead on building trust between those who want to be there and create a safe haven for knowledge.
2. Community Facilitation is essential.
You need a community facilitator or moderator to provide cohesion and maintain direction for the CoP. Almost without exception, the most successful CoPs had a good and effective facilitator. Some of the roles and duties of a facilitator include:
- Supporting sociability, relationship and trust building
- Seeding and feeding discussion topics
- Maintaining and sustaining the community ‘rhythm’.
- Curating and signposting knowledge artefacts for capture and reuse
- Helping to connect community members
- Providing help with the CoP tools and facilities
- Ensuring the community space is kept “tidy” and navigable
- Reporting CoP activity – metrics, evaluations, newsletters
- Monitoring success criteria and impact.
3. Establish your KPIs.
Be clear about what your CoP is trying to achieve. Remember this is a “community” so engage with the members to agree purpose and intended outcomes. Once the purpose and outcomes are agreed you can identify the metrics that will measure progress. Try to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data for the metrics you measure.
When monitoring the metrics, remember that each CoP will have a particular rhythm or cycle. Some will be light on discussion and strong on shared document building and vice versa. Others will be ‘one-shot’ supporting a single challenge. Not all communities will be a hive of activity; some will support its participants at a low level of interaction over a long period, others for short bursts around face-to-face-meetings or events.
Key lesson: Don’t rely on metrics to claim your community is successful; use metrics and indicators to understand your community better.
4. ROI can be measured.
You can guarantee that someone, sometime, somewhere is going to ask about return on investment. I’d much prefer to consider the “I” in ROI as meaning “Impact”, but we live in a world where – for some – value can only be measured in terms of cash saved. Be prepared for this and consider how ROI can be quantified. In the example for local government CoPs we identified cash savings for online (virtual) conferences compared to physical (face to face) conferences and found that on average £8000 can be saved for each on-line conference. Online conferences have now become a fairly regular feature, so the potential savings continue to accrue.
5. Hotseats generate heat!
Hotseats are where you invite a recognised expert or illuminory to spend some time answering questions from the community. The event should be promoted and advertised in advance to generate interest, and the person invited into the hotseat can seed the discussions by issuing a statement or question (possibly controversial) prior to the hotseat starting. Questions and answers are posted in the forum. The event can generate a lot of interest and discussions within the community usually continue long after the hotseat has finished.
6. Use stories to promote the benefits
Don’t just rely on newsletters, statistics or case studies to promote the benefits of the CoP. Bring it alive through stories and anecdotes from the community members. Publish, promote and reward these stories. There is no better endorsement for the success of a CoP than from the CoP members themselves.
Knowledge Hub
The final part of the session was devoted to the thinking behind the development of a “next generation” community of practice platform – the “Knowledge Hub”. What problems were we trying to fix with this new platform? Briefly stated these were:
- Over 80% of the CoPs had been set up as private spaces (gated access via the Facilitator as opposed to just being able to join). In effect these were silo’d knowledge repositories. We wanted a system that would encourage more interaction between CoPs.
- There was lack of permeability with external (outside the firewall) conversations. We wanted a system that could easily integrate with external web services.
- We wanted to address the perennial issue of information overload, perhaps more accurately described as “filter failure”. Using explicit data provided by the user in their on-line profile, e.g. where they work, their area of expertise, what groups they join, etc., filters could be established to improve the relevance of information received.
- In a similar way to the way that Amazon works, we wanted to track user behaviour (their digital footprint) in order to “push” relevant information – e.g. conversations, events, and documents to the users.
- We wanted active and guided navigation to help users find and access relevant knowledge.
- We wanted to tap into the emerging market for mashups and apps; providing users with the tools to combine and link data to create value-added apps for improving council services.
- We wanted to reduce development costs and open up the architecture to enable developers and entrepreneurs to create additional value. We would use open source software and adopt open standards (e.g. OAuth, OpenSocial, OpenGraph etc.).
However, as with all things public sector, the budget was radically scaled back early in 2011 and consequently not all of these features will be implemented. The cut-down version of the local government platform was launched 27 October 2011. (http://knowledgehub.local.gov.uk).
But the dream lives on. With support from PFI Knowledge Solutions (Knowledge Hub developers) a roadmap of future enhancements for their innovative Intelligus platform may eventually deliver all of the original requirements. More on this later; a matter of “watch this space”!
I’ll be happy to answer any questions about the Community of Practice project mentioned above, or the Intelligus platform that may realise the original vision for the Knowledge Hub.
