The Open University is always keen to develop ways of enhancing feedback to students, since comments on assignments are a key aspect of the distance tuition process. Students traditionally receive detailed written feedback on their assignment scripts in the form of annotations and corrections as well as separate written comments summarising their overall performance. For foreign language speaki...

Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios quantify the additional cost of an intervention relative to the additional benefit associated with its use. Whether an intervention is considered cost-effective depends largely on policy decisions regarding whether the additional benefit is worth the additional cost in the context of competing needs for resources. In the United States, costeffectiveness ana...

Mortality among HIV-infected patients after the first year of antiretroviral therapy has not improved in recent years. Future improvement in survival may come partly through earlier diagnosis and institution of treatment and by maximizing treatment adherence. However, outcomes in HIV disease are also influenced today by long-term treatment toxicities, non-HIV-specific comorbid conditions, and c...

The main options for dual nucleoside (or nucleotide) analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors (nRTIs) as a component of initial antiretroviral therapy regimens are tenofovir/emtricitabine, zidovudine/lamivudine, and abacavir/lamivudine as fixed-dose combinations. Resistance to nRTIs can limit usefulness of many of the drugs in the class. Investigation of triple nRTI regimens has shown that zid...

Wide-area network applications are increasingly being built using component-based models, enabling integration of diverse functionality in modules distributed across the network. In such models, dynamic component selection and deployment enables an application to flexibly adapt to changing client and network characteristics, achieve loadbalancing, and satisfy QoS requirements. Unfortunately, th...

BACKGROUND Professionals are interested in using e-health but implementation of new methods is slow. Barriers to implementation include the need for training and limited awareness or experience. Research may not always convince mental health professionals (MHPs). Adding the 'voice' of mental health service users (MHSUs) in collaborative learning may help. Involving MHSUs in face-face education ...