BACKGROUND Nurses and other health professionals in the U.K. can gain similar prescribing rights to doctors by undertaking a non-medical prescribing course. Non-medical prescribing students must have a thorough understanding of the pharmacology of prescribing to ensure safe practice. Pharmacology education at this level is complicated by the variation in students' prior subject knowledge of, an...

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of ten words exhibiting phonological free variation in their phonemic or accentual makeup. The study uses data from the News archives of the BBC Learning English website. The rates of use of the variants for each lexical item are given and discussed.

Today, we are emerging in an electronic society, where the learning is not limited to traditional, face to face approach of instruction only. Educators and learners can get the benefit of electronic technology for teaching and learning, with in a blended learning environment. Micro learning is a new learning technique used in education, for the delivery of the content in small parts, through sm...

This paper reports the use of podcasts in blended-learning at the University of Minho, in Portugal. Six lecturers created their own podcasts with different purposes in order to support their undergraduate and graduate courses and their students’ (n=318) learning. The reported study belongs to a broader project about the impact of podcasts in blended-learning and it reports data from two semeste...

BACKGROUND Students regard biological science as one of the most difficult components of the nursing curriculum. However, a good understanding of this area is essential for effective nursing practice. The aim of this study was to explore nursing students' perceptions of the usefulness of supplementary biology podcasts for their learning. METHODS Biological science podcasts (n=9) were made ava...

The use of podcasts in learning has been supported by distance education theories that deal with the role of interaction as well as communication in improving teaching and learning. New technologies such as podcasts can have influential learner support in distance education and address learner cognitive requirements by incorporating communication within study resources. The present study invest...

Podcasts are audio files distributed via the Internet to share information asynchronously. Users can subscribe to podcasts (for automatic download), which offer highly customizable learning materials ideal for graduate medical education (GME). Users can now dictate the ‘‘who,’’ ‘‘what,’’ and ‘‘when’’ of their learning experience. Podcasts can vary in length and their episodic release can occur ...