University of the Cordilleras

IntroductionIn Saudi Arabia, nurses operate in a complex healthcare environment, characterized by a highly diverse expatriate workforce, rapid digital transformation (including the widespread adoption of electronic health records), and ongoing staffing shortages. Despite increasing demands for adaptability, Learning Agility among nurses appears suboptimal, and limited research has examined how the work practice environment supports this capability in Saudi hospitals. This study examined nurses' work practice environment, Learning Agility, and the factors associated with them.MethodA cross-sectional descriptive design was used. A convenience sample of 375 nurses was recruited from three Ministry of Health (MOH) hospitals in Riyadh and Jeddah between December 2022 and March 2023. Data were collected using the Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index and the Marmara Learning Agility Scale. Ethical approval was obtained from the Shaqra University Ethics Research Committee and participating institutions. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation, and multiple linear regression.ResultsThe mean Practice Environment Scale score was 2.89 (SD = 0.73, maximum = 4), with "Nursing foundation for quality of care" rated the highest (mean = 3.13, SD = 0.79) and "Staff and resource adequacy" the lowest (mean = 2.73, SD = 0.91), indicating resource and staffing challenges. The mean Learning Agility score was 3.67 (SD = 0.73, maximum = 5), with the highest dimension being "Result agility" (mean = 3.89, SD = 0.75). Strong predictors of Learning Agility included nurse participation in hospital affairs, nursing foundation for quality of care, and collegial nurse-physician relationships, while a negative association between "Staff and resource adequacy" and Change Agility and between "Nurse manager ability, leadership, and support of nurses" and Result Agility/Self-awareness were noted.ConclusionA significant association was identified between nurses' work practice environment and Learning Agility. Addressing staffing and resource adequacy, strengthening leadership support, promoting interprofessional collaboration, and enhancing participation in decision-making may foster adaptive capacity. These findings have implications for care quality and organizational resilience in rapidly evolving healthcare systems.

This study investigates teachers' perceptions, utilization patterns, and challenges in adopting ChatGPT, aiming to develop an evidence-based training program for responsible and effective AI integration in basic education. Using a mixed methods design, data were gathered from eighty public elementary school teachers in the Philippines to explore frequency of use, perceived usefulness, and contextual barriers. Results show universal awareness and widespread application of ChatGPT, particularly for assessment generation, lesson preparation, and professional tasks. Teachers reported strong perceived usefulness, yet expressed concerns regarding academic integrity, privacy, prompt construction, accuracy verification, and curriculum alignment. Inferential analysis revealed significant differences in acceptance and utilization across teaching experience groups, indicating varying levels of digital confidence. Qualitative themes further underscored issues of ethical use and technical constraints. Guided by the findings, a structured training program was developed to enhance teachers' digital competence, strengthen ethical and pedagogical practices, and support responsible AI adoption in educational settings.

The hidden curriculum in nursing education refers to the implicit lessons transmitted through routines, relationships, and unit culture that shape how learners interpret what is truly valued in practice. Although it can strengthen professional identity and adaptive competence, it can also normalize unsafe shortcuts, silence, emotional detachment, and risk tolerance that undermine both safety-critical behaviors and compassionate care. This commentary reframes the hidden curriculum as a modifiable driver of patient safety and moral formation within clinical learning environments, using a human factors and systems lens to connect everyday signals to observable outcomes such as hand hygiene adherence, medication verification, handoff reliability, near-miss reporting, willingness to speak up, and respectful patient-centered interactions. A practical reform package is proposed that aligns educator role modeling, structured debriefing, psychologically safe team routines, and unit-level measurement with feasible evaluation within one academic year. Treating the hidden curriculum as part of work system design, rather than an unavoidable cultural residue, creates an actionable pathway for nursing programs and partner hospitals to improve safety while strengthening professional formation and mobility-ready practice norms. This commentary also situates the hidden curriculum within a Christian ethical framework, emphasizing compassion, dignity, truthfulness, humility, and service as core values that shape both patient safety and the formation of nurses as morally grounded professionals.

The Philippines ranks third in the world for jail and prison overcrowding, so alternatives to incarceration are very important. This research concentrates on the Parole and Probation Administration's (PPA) role in furnishing these services to parolees and probationers. The research aims to determine the regional and field offices' ideas to deliver successful services to society. Using a descriptive mixed-method design, the research was done in selected regions of the Philippines. It used survey questionnaires, statistical analysis, document review, and in-depth interviews. Results indicate that the PPA has a strong multi-sectoral collaboration with local social welfare services, health departments, educational institutions, and religious groups. These collaborations help address the diverse needs of probationers and parolees, such as healthcare, mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and education. However, challenges have still been experienced, such as inadequate resources. To conclude, collaboration with other community sectors helps deliver services to PPA clients.

In the Philippines, there is a need for culturally localized Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) datasets that account for regional diversity, as existing benchmarks are mostly derived from Western or East Asian populations, leading to reduced accuracy when applied to ethnolinguistically distinct subjects. This paper proposes a region-specific Northern Philippines Facial Emotion Dataset (NP-FED) comprising participants from the Cordillera Administrative Region and the Ilocos Region. The dataset contains 4,000 macro-expression images of 114 undergraduate students aged 18-23 from the University of the Cordilleras. Specifically, seven emotions were captured (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, and neutral), at five standard angles (front, top, bottom, right, and left). Strict criteria were applied to ensure the representativeness of the target demographic, followed by a twostage quality assurance process to preserve the authenticity of the dataset. To evaluate the learnability of the NP-FED, a baseline CNN model was developed. The model yielded Top-1 training and test accuracies of 48.66% and 24.91%, respectively. The findings show that the NP-FED is learnable but faces generalization issues. The macro-F1 score and balanced accuracy metrics further point out issues with class imbalance and inter-class similarity. For future studies, the focus should be on utilizing data augmentation to expand the dataset, balancing distributions of classes, performing transfer learning with pretrained models, involving expert annotation validation, or, alternatively, the use of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and comparing the NP-FED across other datasets to better represent Northern Philippines facial cues and enhance inclusive machine learning.