Search

Implementing online learning can pose serious pedagogical challenges particularly when programs contain work-integrated learning (WIL) components. One such component is the site visit, where student groups are led by subject matter experts through an authentic environment. These WIL experiences help students relate the theory learnt in classrooms to practice. Construction management students particularly benefit from repeated visits to the same building site to appreciate the spatial and temporal constraints and how they change over the life of the building project. Unfortunately, logistics and occupational health and safety concerns have increasingly limited the inclusion of site visits in school and university curricula. Online construction management students are widely dispersed and therefore it is impractical to include shared physical site visits in the curriculum, although students are able to observe locally-based construction sites and report back their findings. In response, universities have collaborated with construction companies and, using significant federal funding, created an interactive learning environment that follows the construction of an eight-storey building over time. This high quality resource is a type of virtual WIL that has been primarily used in face-to-face teaching. In this case study we implement this resource in a fully online construction management course and create three comparatively low-cost environments that demonstrate the construction of residential, industrial, and multi-storey building construction sites, for implementation in another two online construction courses. As an enhancement, within these new environments are embedded images, explanatory videos and documents which students can interact with to create a virtual tour that can be embedded directly alongside the concepts being studied in their weekly learning materials. In addition, these tours are linked to specific online learning activities designed to motivate students to reflect on and refine their understandings based on the authentic context they are experiencing. To better understand the processes involved in this collaboration between school academics, staff from a central teaching innovation unit, and two construction companies, the business processes employed were modelled using a swimlane diagram. Insights into the practicalities of implementing these virtual tours are shared. The experiential learning outcomes of students using virtual WIL are comparable to traditional site visits. Initial online student feedback of small cohorts of online students has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging for the development of more interactive virtual tours. The implementation of virtual tours and activities, blended with independent face-to-face site visits and assessment, forms an authentic, supported and constructively-aligned WIL experience for students undertaking fully online courses.

There are many choices for learning mathematics for engineering students with courses available in face-to-face, blended and fully online modalities. Students are demanding more flexibility in their programs, however the temptation to misuse this flexibility to avoid mathematical studies until it is too late can be an unfortunate side effect. A key issue here is that students may not have the skills needed to effectively self-regulate their learning. Using the 3P model of student learning as a guide we explore what happens to student learning outcomes when the best available online and face-to-face teaching and learning for mathematics students are used to create a blended learning environment for first year engineers that encourages self-regulation of learning. Experiments included online quizzes for changing attitudes, refreshing assumed knowledge and teaching foundational concepts, archived online lecture options in addition to face-to-face lectures, the adoption of board tutorials supported by a problem-solving approach for more complex engineering modelling problems and scaffolded with online interactive problems. Shared websites for online and face-to-face cohorts allowed the amount of blending to be determined by the individual student. Learning outcomes for blended first year engineering mathematics courses can be improved by implementing online learning tools that automate key learning conversations and implement effective face-to-face learning activities such as board tutorials that support students to self-regulate their learning of mathematics.

Despite the exponential growth in online learning, student retention rates in the online environment remain a concern to educators. Online learning @ UniSA is a learning object aimed at laying foundations for online learning for prospective students. It uses the voices of student peers to explore the qualities needed to succeed. Through the insights of four students and their facilitator, prospective online learners can make an informed choice about whether online study is likely to suit their own situation. Preliminary data supports the authors' hypothesis that the web site has allowed prospective students to select online study with their eyes wide open to what this choice really means.

Rarely do university departments of mathematics redesign their basic mathematics courses. Through developing an online version of our associate degree in engineering in collaboration with Open Universities Australia, we redesigned the first in a sequence of five engineering mathematics courses. The online cohort proved different to our face-to-face experience. We embarked on a process of refining the unit using experiential learning and action research. The 13 week unit is delivered up to four times a year and this paper reviews the first 10 cycles of enhancements over 3 years and unpacks the layers of hypotheses underlying development decisions. Several category themes were identified with a focus on students, teachers and learning activities. Investment in online developments for mathematics can have multiple flow-on impacts for other teaching modes. Good curriculum design, regardless of environment, will always be a cornerstone of effective course development processes.

The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of South Australia (UniSA) have embarked on Federally-funded project to collaborate in the design, development and delivery of a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in engineering. The collaboration investigates new ways to bring together the strengths and discipline expertise of each institution to the students of both universities, utilising blended teaching and learning approaches. The collaboration brings much change--at the organisational level in the blending of programs, at the staff level in their approaches to teaching and at the students' level in their approaches and engagement with cross-institutional blended learning. This paper focuses on how change management principles were used to guide a systematic approach to engaging students into the learning culture associated with the Engineering Hubs and Spokes Project's theme--"Advanced Collaboration for Excellence". (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine current approaches to teaching used in academic development services and consider the diversity of their learners (academic faculty). Faculty engagement with teaching issues and innovations remains a concern for the higher education sector. The academic population contains large numbers of "hard to get at" people, struggling with workload and access issues. Design/methodology/approach: An additional online resource for academic development, called "In a nutshell," has been developed and trialed for three years in a variety of contexts. These resources incorporate voices into concise online presentations with links to further resources. Academic viewers can, in private, participate and make informed decisions about whether they need to learn more about a topic, or not. Findings: A measurable improvement in faculty engagement with teaching issues and innovations has been detected that can be directly and indirectly attributed to this change in academic development approach. Usage data and user feedback supports the hypothesis that "In a nutshells" have had an impact on adult learners. Requests by faculty to collaborate on the production of new "In a nutshells" also indicate engagement. Positive changes in teaching and learning performance indicators are supportive. Research limitations/implications: The study provides evidence to support the use of concise, flexible and asynchronous online approaches as components of a structured academic development program that provides mandated and non-mandated learning opportunities for university faculty. The addition of this approach can increase the reach of academic development to include those who can be traditionally hard to reach such as sessional faculty, workplace supervisors and time-poor, full-time academics. The concept has recently been extended to create concise learning support that engages and empowers new students to develop new skills. Practical implications: A streaming server and software is required. Multiple versions of the material are created to ensure accessibility. The time commitment required to invest in initial production of high-quality product is high; however, this is counter-balanced by the re-usability and outreach of the approach. Originality/value: Partial alignment of learning design and user feedback to an inclusive adult motivation framework indicates that although "In a nutshells" do meet most requirements of the framework, complementary activities that build the competence of faculty are needed to be linked to "In a nutshells" to ensure that all targeted adults are motivated to learn. (Contains 8 figures and 1 table.)

Gram-negative bacteria inhabit a broad range of ecological niches. For Escherichia coli, this includes river water as well as humans and animals, where it can be both a commensal and a pathogen (1-3). Intricate regulatory mechanisms ensure that bacteria have the right complement of [beta]-barrel outer membrane proteins (OMPs) to enable adaptation to a particular habitat (4,5). Yet no mechanism is known for replacing OMPs in the outer membrane, an issue that is further confounded by the lack of an energy source and the high stability (6) and abundance of OMPs (5). Here we uncover the process underpinning OMP turnover in E.coli and show it to be passive and binary in nature, in which old OMPs are displaced to the poles of growing cells as new OMPs take their place. Using fluorescent colicins as OMP-specific probes, in combination with ensemble and single-molecule fluorescence microscopy invivo and invitro, as well as molecular dynamics simulations, we established the mechanism for binary OMP partitioning. OMPs clustered to form ~0.5-[micro]m diameter islands, where their diffusion is restricted by promiscuous interactions with other OMPs. OMP islands were distributed throughout the cell and contained the Bam complex, which catalyses the insertion of OMPs in the outer membrane (7,8). However, OMP biogenesis occurred as a gradient that was highest at mid-cell but largely absent at cell poles. The cumulative effect is to push old OMP islands towards the poles of growing cells, leading to a binary distribution when cells divide. Hence, the outer membrane of a Gram-negative bacterium is a spatially and temporally organized structure, and this organization lies at the heart of how OMPs are turned over in the membrane., We developed a strategy for following the localization and turnover of OMPs using colicins (9,10), which circumvents the need for fluorescent protein fusions. Protein fusions are the method-of-choice for investigating [...]

Colony blot analysis of an Aeromonas hydrophila genomic library utilizing antiserum to A. hydrophila A6 cell envelopes showed a cosmid clone expressing a 30-kDa protein which is previously unknown in aeromonads. It has two potential open reading frames (ORFs) with homology to known immunophilin proteins. ORF1 encoded a 212-amino-acid protein with 56% identity to the immunophilin SlyD protein of Escherichia coli. ORF3 encoded a potential gene product of 268 amino acids with the usual signal sequence and a predicted molecular size of 28.7 kDa. The coded amino acid sequence has 46% identity with the sequence of the FkpA protein of E. coli and 40% identity with the sequence of the macrophage infectivity potentiator protein of Legionella pneumophila.

In the past decade, ambulatory medical detoxification for alcohol withdrawal has become increasingly utilized due to pressures to contain cost of treatment and research demonstrating its effectiveness. The research that describes this area spans the last 15 years. This article reviews the available literature on ambulatory detoxification and attempts to summarize and synthesize what is known about this area in order to make ambulatory medical detoxification readily reproducible in clinical practice. Finally, this article concludes with an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of outpatient alcohol detoxification as compared to inpatient treatment., INTRODUCTION Ambulatory medical detoxification for alcohol has become popular in the last decade primarily due to the search for cost-effective alternatives to inpatient care and the increasing research that demonstrates [...]

Implementing online learning can pose serious pedagogical challenges particularly when programs contain work-integrated learning (WIL) components. One such component is the site visit, where student groups are led by subject matter experts through an authentic environment. These WIL experiences help students relate the theory learnt in classrooms to practice. Construction management students particularly benefit from repeated visits to the same building site to appreciate the spatial and temporal constraints and how they change over the life of the building project. Unfortunately, logistics and occupational health and safety concerns have increasingly limited the inclusion of site visits in school and university curricula. Online construction management students are widely dispersed and therefore it is impractical to include shared physical site visits in the curriculum, although students are able to observe locally-based construction sites and report back their findings. In response, universities have collaborated with construction companies and, using significant federal funding, created an interactive learning environment that follows the construction of an eight-storey building over time. This high quality resource is a type of virtual WIL that has been primarily used in face-to-face teaching. In this case study we implement this resource in a fully online construction management course and create three comparatively low-cost environments that demonstrate the construction of residential, industrial, and multi-storey building construction sites, for implementation in another two online construction courses. As an enhancement, within these new environments are embedded images, explanatory videos and documents which students can interact with to create a virtual tour that can be embedded directly alongside the concepts being studied in their weekly learning materials. In addition, these tours are linked to specific online learning activities designed to motivate students to reflect on and refine their understandings based on the authentic context they are experiencing. To better understand the processes involved in this collaboration between school academics, staff from a central teaching innovation unit, and two construction companies, the business processes employed were modelled using a swimlane diagram. Insights into the practicalities of implementing these virtual tours are shared. The experiential learning outcomes of students using virtual WIL are comparable to traditional site visits. Initial online student feedback of small cohorts of online students has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging for the development of more interactive virtual tours. The implementation of virtual tours and activities, blended with independent face-to-face site visits and assessment, forms an authentic, supported and constructivelyaligned WIL experience for students undertaking fully online courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The textbook tradition has stood the test of time since the basic features of texts have remained stable for the past 400 years. However, the role of the textbook as the major authority in the transmission of knowledge is under severe threat. Interviews with students undertaking a compulsory topic in immunology indicated that the majority of students did not study their textbook in the manner expected by their professor. In this paper we attempt to examine the role of textbook in relation to advent of modern technologies that these students proved adept in using. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]