Darina M. Slattery

University of Limerick | UL · School of English Irish and Communication

Invited featured speaker presentation: This talk will discuss strategies for determining if an academic course is a good candidate for online delivery, how to plan for online delivery, and how to convert or re-purpose materials. It will also discuss how to deal with some of the challenges typically faced by online teachers and how to evaluate the s...

Since 2013, students from the University of Limerick (UL), the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Université Paris Diderot (UPD) have collaborated on a documentation and translation assignment in virtual teams. The UL and UCF students, who study technical communication, collaborate to write procedural documents. The UPD students translate the...

Nowadays there is a huge volume of financial information available on the web. There is also considerable debate about the impact, if any, that this information has on share prices and overall market sentiment. Fundamental and technical analysts believe that there is some value in financial information and that it can be exploited for predictive pu...

In recent times, there has been a steady increase in civic engagement activities in Irish higher education settings at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. However, there is limited literature to-date describing the nature of these activities and how they have affected learning outcomes and enhanced the overall student experience. To that e...

Global virtual teams provide numerous benefits for corporations employing virtual organizational forms and for individual teams and team members. However, virtual collaboration also presents some well-recognized challenges. A growing body of research has examined the process of virtual teaming and the challenges inherent in that process. This study...

In 2014, the UK National Health Service (NHS) ‘Five Year Forward View' plan set out key objectives to reform the NHS, which included empowering the population as a whole (particularly those with long-term health conditions) to take more responsibility for managing their own healthcare and introducing initiatives to use technology to improve service...

In 2014, the UK National Health Service (NHS) ‘Five Year Forward View' plan set out key objectives to reform the NHS, which included empowering the population as a whole (particularly those with long-term health conditions) to take more responsibility for managing their own healthcare and introducing initiatives to use technology to improve service...

This study explores the viewing patterns of 17 instructional videos in both a traditional and flipped classroom environment by 732 business students taking an IT-related module. While previous work has concentrated mainly on outputs(e.g. student satisfaction/results), this study focuses on how the nature of students’ interactions with videos can be...

Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to offer online postgraduate programmes. Although it is reasonably common to convert existing programmes to online or blended delivery modes, it is unusual to offer a programme simultaneously in online, on-campus, and blended delivery modes. This paper describes the authors’ experiences o...

Although for centuries people have been writing instructions to explain technological advancements, technical communication only developed as a recognised occupational field in the twentieth century. The expansion of software industries in the 1980s, driven by the exponential increase in business computing and home computer ownership, led to a need...

This article reports on a qualitative study of strategies and competencies used by technical communication and translation students to address challenges inherent in global virtual team collaboration. The study involved students from three universities collaborating in virtual teams to write and translate instructional documents. Qualitative conten...

Entrepreneurs need to develop a range of skills to be successful, including skills in decision making, risk management, problem solving, communication, and teamwork. Games and simulations are increasingly being used in both academia and business to encourage such skills development. This paper describes a business simulation module whereby postgrad...

Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to offer online postgraduate programmes. Although it is reasonably common to convert existing programmes to online or blended delivery modes, it is unusual to offer a programme simultaneously in online, on-campus, and blended delivery modes. This paper describes the authors' experiences of...

This chapter examines the pedagogical strategies adopted by faculty teaching in the Master of Arts in Technical Communication and E-Learning program at the University of Limerick, Ireland. These strategies enable students to design and develop global technical communication and e-learning content. By the end of the program, students have participat...

Abstract available: http://programme.exordo.com/edtech2015/delegates/presentation/14/

Abstract available: http://programme.exordo.com/edtech2015/delegates/presentation/14/

This article describes the mission, history, development, structure, and curriculum of the MA in Technical Communication and E-Learning, which is offered by the University of Limerick. The program started as a Graduate Diploma/ MA in Technical Communication but merged with the MA in E-Learning Design and Development in 2010. While the curriculum ha...

Some issues of current concern in engineering education are described. The theory, rationale and implementation of reflective practice in educational settings are briefly reviewed. The use of reflective writing in the University of Limerick’s (UL) Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Civil Engineering programme is described. The habit of ‘reflection’ is em...

Financial information is extremely valuable to investors and other interested parties. This information, which can be qualitative or quantitative in nature, can be analyzed and subsequently used to try to predict future share prices and/or determine market sentiment. Financial writers need to bear this in mind when writing reports, as their mes...

In this article, we introduce two programmes in Technical Communication (one distance, and one on-campus) offered by the University of Limerick. Both programmes have been running for several years, but are regularly reviewed to ensure that they remain relevant. We describe how these programmes correspond to industry needs, and how they develop...

It is generally accepted that there are three different types of financial information: information in past stock prices, information that is available to all the public, and information that is both available to the public and available pri-vately to insiders [1-4]. This study looks at publicly-available information in Form 8K disclosures filed on...

As virtual teams become more common in the workplace, a growing body of research has examined the factors critical to their success. Many studies have focused on practitioners or on students in business programs. This paper examines virtual team collaboration among technical communication students at the University of Limerick (UL) and at the Unive...

Effective leadership is crucial to the success of global virtual teams. Team leaders have many responsibilities and face many challenges. Leaders must provide structure for team members and find ways to personalize virtual work relationships. Often, leaders of virtual teams are also charged with the responsibility of media selection and of helping...

Global virtual teams provide numerous benefits both for corporations employing virtual organizational forms and for individual teams and team members. However, virtual collaboration also presents some well-recognized challenges. A growing body of research has examined the process of virtual teaming and the challenges inherent in that process. Many...

This paper explores how information and communication technologies (ICTs) were used to support deep learning in some of the modules on the Master of Arts in E-Learning Design and Development at the University of Limerick. This paper describes how the author used ICTs, as well as online teaching and learning theories, to improve the learning experie...

This paper describes the main components of the system built by the DLT Group at Limerick for participation in the QA Task at CLEF. The document indexing we used was again sentence-by-sentence but this year the Lucene Engine was adopted. We also experimented with retrieval query expansion using Local Context Analysis. Results were broadly similar t...