Erika Goble

An Overview of Moral Distress and the Paediatric Intensive Care Team

A summary of the existing literature related to moral distress (MD) and the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) reveals a high-tech, high-pressure environment in which effective teamwork can be compromised by MD arising from different situations related to: consent for treatment, futile care, end-of-life decision making, formal decision-making structures, training and experience by discipline, individual values and attitudes, and power and authority issues. Attempts to resolve MD in PICUs have included the use of administrative tools such as shift worksheets, the implementation of continuing education, and encouragement to report. The literature does not yet show these approaches to be effective in the resolution of MD. The need to acknowledge MD among PICU teams is discussed and an argument made that, to facilitate understanding among team members, practice stories need to be shared.

From Interdisciplinary to Transdisciplinary Research: A Case Study

The specialization of contemporary academia necessitates the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach to study topics that cross multiple disciplines, including the area of medical ethics. However, the nature of multidisciplinary research is limited in some regards, further requiring some researchers to use interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. The authors present as a case study a research project in bioethics that began as an interdisciplinary study and which, through the research process, moved to being a transdisciplinary study in health ethics. They outline not only this transformation but also the strengths and difficulties of transdisciplinary research in the area of ethics.

A Classroom at Home: Children and the Lived World of MOOCs.

This research asks “What is it like for a K-12 school-age child to learn in a massive open online course (MOOC)?” Evidence suggested that a significant number of children are participating in MOOCs either independently or alongside their parents, both inside and outside the K-12 school system. Researchers have expressed concerns regarding how these self-directed, massive learning environments may alter children’s study patterns and habits. However, little scholarly attention has been devoted to this unique phenomenon. In particular, rigorous qualitative inquiry is needed to undercover the complex realities of children’s actual experiences in MOOCs. Following the methodological approach “phenomenology of practice,” our study analyzed lived experience descriptions (LEDs) gathered during interviews with 12 children–parent couplets; each child had completed at least one MOOC including Coursera’s Dino 101. This article highlights several themes that arose in our existential analyses of the collected LEDs.