BHP activities for 2021

BHP support for the IUBAT College of Nursing continued during 2020. We still welcome volunteers to support the local faculty, especially with clinical supervision. However, our focus has been “behind the scenes” partly due to the pandemic restrictions and also to advance several exciting new developments:

1. Working with Nurses International, we have been converting the BScN curriculum to an Open Educational Resource. You can read about this in several publications.

2. During 2020 we worked with IUBAT faculty to develop a proposal for a Masters in Public Health Program. This will create a career pathway for nurses and other health care professionals. The national regulator is now reviewing the application, so we hope that students will be admitted later in 2021.

3. Working with another NGO, Oasis for Posterity, we have supported development of a vocational college in a rural area of northern Bangladesh. We hope to offer a training program for community health workers and a primary care clinic that can also be used for training BScN and MPH students.

As always, we welcome volunteer contributions and involvement in these activities, whether working from home or in Bangladesh. Donations are always welcome.

Open Education Resources now available

When BHP volunteers helped IUBAT build the College of Nursing starting in 2003, we had to create all the learning resources ourselves. We wrote the course lectures and exams based on current textbooks in various subjects so that the syllabus meets the requirements of the nursing councils in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. Each semester successive groups of visiting faculty volunteers updated and improved the content. Fifteen years later, that curriculum has been tested by volunteers with current clinical and teaching experience and used with many batches of students. We are now partnering with Nurses International, a US-based NGO to make these digitized materials available as Open Education Resources [OER], meaning everything can be downloaded, used and adapted without cost under the Creative Commons Licensing system. The intended audience is junior nurse educators who may need support as they begin their teaching careers. Please use the Nurses International link to access the materials or contact BHP if you would like to volunteer with further OER development.

Update July 2019

In July 2019, Alex Berland visited IUBAT College of Nursing, meeting with Dr. Abdur Rab, Vice-Chancellor and Mr. Mohammad Ullah, Chair of the College of Nursing. They discussed Open Educational Resources, post-graduate nursing courses and clinical placements. Alex also presented a lecture for the general IUBAT audience on “Technology Enabled Learning”, highlighting how the BHP BSN curriculum is now being shared globally through Nurses International. He then met with College of Nursing faculty to discuss current teaching issues, particularly how to meet the challenges of increased enrolment, especially for active learning in the classroom. In addition to Dr. Karen Lund and Alex, three other volunteers will be visiting IUBAT CoN later this year. Since his last visit, Alex reports, the BSN program is experiencing strong enrollment growth, is retaining its local faculty who are working through recommendations of the largely positive accreditation report, and has recently renewed clinical placement agreements. In the near future, construction will begin for a laboratory block offering greatly enlarged lab facilities where BSN students can develop their clinical skills.