Fulbright New York scholar, Professor Kathy Nokes will hold a workshop titled, ‘One Person, Two Infections: HIV/TB today at Durban University of Technology’s ML Sultan Campus…
Fulbright New York scholar, Professor Kathy Nokes will hold a workshop titled, ‘One Person, Two Infections: HIV/TB today at Durban University of Technology’s ML Sultan Campus. Professor Nokes is the Director of the Graduate Nursing Program at Hunter College, Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing at City University of New York. Her visit to South Africa is aimed at building research and publication capacity within the university’s Postgraduate Nursing programme and collaborative research project between the two universities.
Over the last eleven years she has visited South Africa seven times to establish academic partnerships. She has published more than 80 research papers internationally, focusing on HIV/AIDS and Nursing Education. Her career in nursing began in 1967 and subsequently began teaching nursing in 1970.
During her visit, Professor Nokes will hold a series of lectures for academic staff on writing for professional journals and publications and seminars on choosing research instruments. She will also be working on including HIV/AIDS education as part of nursing curriculum and outreach practices.
Professor Nokes said the Occupational Health Postgraduate Nursing programme currently uses a blended learning approach using Blackboard an online learning programme to communicate with students and face to face teaching and learning in the classroom. She said: “The benefit of Blackboard is that it allows you to communicate with students over long distance and allows for remote learning.”
In regards to research capacity building, Professor Nokes described the non-course dissertation approach as problematic. She said: “The concept is lovely and in principle it works, however students have been found to take an enormous amount of time to complete their study. When you look at the student throughput, students are not graduating. The process is therefore not productive. More work needs to be done to make students understand methodologies and the qualitative and quantitative research approach and to provide ongoing support through a variety of venues including use of technology.”
She said it is important to have a forum for students to engage in peer evaluation and discussion which makes the process of research less isolated and enables individual development.
-By Karishma Gunpath
