During the March 2014-January 2016 Ebola crisis in Liberia, Redemption Hospital lost 12 staff and became a holding facility for suspected cases, prompting violent hostility from the surrounding New Kru Town community, in the capital city Monrovia. Inpatient services were closed for 6 months, leaving the population without maternity care. In January 2015, Redemption reopened, but utilization was low, especially for deliveries. A key barrier was community trust in health workers which worsened during the epidemic. The New Kru Town council, Redemption Hospital, the International Rescue Committee, and Training and Research Support Centre initiated participatory action research (PAR) in July 2015 to build communication between stakeholder groups, and to identify impacts of the epidemic and shared actions to improve the system. The PAR involved pregnant women, community-based trained traditional midwives (TTMs) and traditional birth attendants (TBAs), and community leaders, as well as health workers. Qualitative data and a pre-post survey of PAR participants and community members assessed changes in relationships and maternal health services. The results indicated that Ebola worsened community-hospital relations and pre-existing weaknesses in services, but also provided an opportunity to address these when rebuilding the system through shared action. Findings suggest that PAR generated evidence and improved communication and community and health worker interaction.

An outcomes-based assessment process called QQI, an acronym for Quantity-Quality-Improvement, has been developed and pilot-tested in several courses, both traditional and project-based, in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. An online version of the QQI survey instrument has been created which automates collection of data and rapid generation of reports to faculty. The QQI process, including the instrument and report generator, research and design basis, and results of pilot testing, are described and department-wide implementation plans are discussed.

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Instructor expectations of student behaviors in a teacher-centered course are different from the instructor expectations in a student-centered course. Many students successful in traditional lecture-based courses are frustrated and anxious when working on open-ended projects because they don't understand what is expected of them. Faculty teaching courses with open-ended projects may be equally frustrated that their students do not seem to be correctly perceiving their expectations despite their repetitive efforts to convey these expectations. This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to understand both sides-the instructor's expectations of students and the students' perceptions of the instructor's expectations-in an open-ended, studentcentered classroom. Four students and the instructor were interviewed throughout an upperdivision undergraduate mechanical engineering course. This paper describes the research methods and preliminary results from this study. With the increasing integration of project-centered practices in the engineering classroom, the results of this study are anticipated to be beneficial to other instructors who are trying to transition students from the well-defined expectations of many teacher-centered classrooms to the open-ended expectations of a project-centered environment.

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