Staff/Student Partnership to Encourage Active and Blended Learning

This poster and GASTA talk are a reflective commentary on the steps and collaboration undertaken to redevelop the VLE pages of the University of Glasgow Dental Programme. There are two primary aims of this project, the first is to improve the usability of Moodle by altering the structure and layout. The secondary aim is to facilitate creativity from academic staff by removing barriers that are present in the confines of the current platform and enabling them with a more tailored and functional Moodle. Staff will receive support in the development of more interactive teaching methods, such as interactive videos, flipped classroom, active and blended learning techniques. Moodle is currently primarily used as a repository for lecture slides and lacks a sense of cohesion as each lecturer formats their folders in different ways. Staff experience confusion over what they are responsible for and which files belong to which academic, resulting in increased clutter over many years. For some time, students – through staff/student liaison committees – and staff have complained about the difficulty of navigating and finding resources within our Moodle section. Also, as the current layout does not lend itself well to enabling staff wishing to try innovative active or use blended learning approaches only a few early adopters have tried. So, at the beginning of academic year 2018/19 a decision was made to consider a full redevelopment of programme Moodle structures with a ‘blank slate’ philosophy. Utilising Adekola et al’s (2017) framework for guiding transitions into blended and online education we identified the key factors, stakeholders, and barriers & enablers to making this scale of change. As part of engaging stakeholders, the project would initially be carried out as a collaboration between early innovator academics, technical support, and students. The Dental School already has many years of experience in engaging students in e-learning development (McKerlie et al, 2016) so could engage with the student experience through our established Technology Enhanced Learning & Teaching Partnership staff/student forum. As we also already had extensive School experience in the use of flipped classroom techniques (Crothers et al, 2017) we could use these structures and lessons learned as a starting point from which to develop templates. Using the ABC Learning Design technique (Young & Perovic, 2016) to support lecturers to build their content around the Biggs (2003) model of Constructive Alignment the aim was to utilise the Clinical Dentistry course to create Moodle pages organised both chronologically and by subject, with active and blended learning elements embedded throughout. With the development of these structures and templates we expect more lecturers will find it easier to engage with and utilise TELT techniques. This poster and session will reflect on the journey and experience of collaborating to redevelop the Clinical Dentistry section into the new model and offer insights into how to support academic staff to utilise creative approaches through online and blended learning

Staff/Student Partnership to Encourage Active and Blended Learning

This poster and GASTA talk are a reflective commentary on the steps and collaboration undertaken to redevelop the VLE pages of the University of Glasgow Dental Programme. There are two primary aims of this project, the first is to improve the usability of Moodle by altering the structure and layout. The secondary aim is to facilitate creativity from academic staff by removing barriers that are present in the confines of the current platform and enabling them with a more tailored and functional Moodle. Staff will receive support in the development of more interactive teaching methods, such as interactive videos, flipped classroom, active and blended learning techniques. Moodle is currently primarily used as a repository for lecture slides and lacks a sense of cohesion as each lecturer formats their folders in different ways. Staff experience confusion over what they are responsible for and which files belong to which academic, resulting in increased clutter over many years. For some time, students – through staff/student liaison committees – and staff have complained about the difficulty of navigating and finding resources within our Moodle section. Also, as the current layout does not lend itself well to enabling staff wishing to try innovative active or use blended learning approaches only a few early adopters have tried. So, at the beginning of academic year 2018/19 a decision was made to consider a full redevelopment of programme Moodle structures with a ‘blank slate’ philosophy. Utilising Adekola et al’s (2017) framework for guiding transitions into blended and online education we identified the key factors, stakeholders, and barriers & enablers to making this scale of change. As part of engaging stakeholders, the project would initially be carried out as a collaboration between early innovator academics, technical support, and students. The Dental School already has many years of experience in engaging students in e-learning development (McKerlie et al, 2016) so could engage with the student experience through our established Technology Enhanced Learning & Teaching Partnership staff/student forum. As we also already had extensive School experience in the use of flipped classroom techniques (Crothers et al, 2017) we could use these structures and lessons learned as a starting point from which to develop templates. Using the ABC Learning Design technique (Young & Perovic, 2016) to support lecturers to build their content around the Biggs (2003) model of Constructive Alignment the aim was to utilise the Clinical Dentistry course to create Moodle pages organised both chronologically and by subject, with active and blended learning elements embedded throughout. With the development of these structures and templates we expect more lecturers will find it easier to engage with and utilise TELT techniques. This poster and session will reflect on the journey and experience of collaborating to redevelop the Clinical Dentistry section into the new model and offer insights into how to support academic staff to utilise creative approaches through online and blended learning

Understanding Neural Coding on Latent Manifolds by Sharing Features and Dividing Ensembles

Systems neuroscience relies on two complementary views of neural data, characterized by single neuron tuning curves and analysis of population activity. These two perspectives combine elegantly in neural latent variable models that constrain the relationship between latent variables and neural activity, modeled by simple tuning curve functions. This has recently been demonstrated using Gaussian processes, with applications to realistic and topologically relevant latent manifolds. Those and previous models, however, missed crucial shared coding properties of neural populations. We propose feature sharing across neural tuning curves, which significantly improves performance and leads to better-behaved optimization. We also propose a solution to the problem of ensemble detection, whereby different groups of neurons, i.e., ensembles, can be modulated by different latent manifolds. This is achieved through a soft clustering of neurons during training, thus allowing for the separation of mixed neural populations in an unsupervised manner. These innovations lead to more interpretable models of neural population activity that train well and perform better even on mixtures of complex latent manifolds. Finally, we apply our method on a recently published grid cell dataset, recovering distinct ensembles, inferring toroidal latents and predicting neural tuning curves all in a single integrated modeling framework

Less acting, more doing: How surface acting relates to perceived meeting effectiveness and other employee outcomes

This study adds to the growing body of research on work meetings and extends the emotional labour literature beyond a service context by examining the relationship between surface acting during meetings and perceived meeting effectiveness. Additionally, the relationships of surface acting during meetings and perceived meeting effectiveness with time-lagged reports of intention to quit and emotional exhaustion 3 months later were investigated. Structural equation modelling of data from 178 working adults revealed negative relationships between surface acting and perceptions of meeting effectiveness. Perceived meeting effectiveness partially mediated the relationship between surface acting and both intention to quit and emotional exhaustion 3 months later. These findings expand both the limited research on perceived meeting effectiveness and the surface acting nomological network to include a consideration that expressing inauthentic emotions in meetings (surface acting) may relate to the perceived effectiveness of the meeting. As well, both surface acting during meetings and perceived meeting effectiveness may relate to how emotionally exhausted employees feel and their intentions to seek other employment. Given the cost and pervasiveness of meetings in daily organizational life and their potential effects on the well-being of employees, understanding how to make meetings effective is paramount – particularly if researchers and practitioners want to better understand how perceived meeting effectiveness may be related to various employee outcomes

Action representation in the mouse parieto-frontal network

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and frontal motor areas comprise a cortical network supporting goal-directed behaviour, with functions including sensorimotor transformations and decision making. In primates, this network links performed and observed actions via mirror neurons, which fire both when individuals perform an action and when they observe the same action performed by a conspecific. Mirror neurons are believed to be important for social learning, but it is not known whether mirror-like neurons occur in similar networks in other social species, such as rodents, or if they can be measured in such models using paradigms where observers passively view a demonstrator. Therefore, we imaged Ca2+ responses in PPC and secondary motor cortex (M2) while mice performed and observed pellet-reaching and wheel-running tasks, and found that cell populations in both areas robustly encoded several naturalistic behaviours. However, neural responses to the same set of observed actions were absent, although we verified that observer mice were attentive to performers and that PPC neurons responded reliably to visual cues. Statistical modelling also indicated that executed actions outperformed observed actions in predicting neural responses. These results raise the possibility that sensorimotor action recognition in rodents could take place outside of the parieto-frontal circuit, and underscore that detecting socially-driven neural coding depends critically on the species and behavioural paradigm used

Promoter keyholes enable specific and persistent multi-gene expression programs in primary T cells without genome modification

Non-invasive epigenome editing is a promising strategy for engineering gene expression programs, yet potency, specificity, and persistence remain challenging. Here we show that effective epigenome editing is gated at single-base precision via 'keyhole' sites in endogenous regulatory DNA. Synthetic repressors targeting promoter keyholes can ablate gene expression in up to 99% of primary cells with single-gene specificity and can seamlessly repress multiple genes in combination. Transient exposure of primary T cells to keyhole repressors confers mitotically heritable silencing that persists to the limit of primary cultures in vitro and for at least 4 weeks in vivo, enabling manufacturing of cell products with enhanced therapeutic efficacy. DNA recognition and effector domains can be encoded as separate proteins that reassemble at keyhole sites and function with the same efficiency as single chain effectors, enabling gated control and rapid screening for novel functional domains that modulate endogenous gene expression patterns. Our results provide a powerful and exponentially flexible system for programming gene expression and therapeutic cell products

Aging in the Right Place

Background: This project builds upon a pilot study that documented innovative shelter/housing solutions that have not undergone rigorous evaluation but hold the promise of supporting “aging in the right place” for older persons (50+) with experiences of homelessness (OPEH) in Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver. “Aging in the right place” means older adults remain in their homes and communities supported by housing, health, social services responsive to their unique lifestyles and needs. While our pilot study identified innovative shelter/housing solutions that support OPEH to establish and maintain a home and work towards aging in the right place, there remains a knowledge gap regarding what works, why it works, and for whom it works. Methods/Design: Through a community-based participatory research approach, we will conduct evaluations of 11 different promising shelter/housing practices to determine the types of practices that appear most useful in supporting aging in the right place, and the groups of OPEH for whom the promising practices work based on intersections of risk (e.g., age, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, disability, Indigenous status, and immigrant status). Our overall goal is to improve the shelter/housing options to meet the unique and complex health and social needs of OPEH across Canada. Discussion: Program evaluations will offer practice-based evidence of ways in which promising practices of shelter/housing might serve as best practices for supporting OPEH to establish and maintain a home and work towards aging in the right place. Project findings will inform housing, homelessness, health, and social service providers’ design and delivery of programs for OPEH to improve the sustainability of community housing, build provider capacity, and ensure supports that promote aging in the right place are sustained

Synaptic convergence patterns onto retinal ganglion cells are preserved despite topographic variation in pre- and postsynaptic territories

Sensory processing can be tuned by a neuron’s integration area, the types of inputs, and the proportion and number of connections with those inputs. Integration areas often vary topographically to sample space differentially across regions. Here, we highlight two visual circuits in which topographic changes in the postsynaptic retinal ganglion cell (RGC) dendritic territories and their presynaptic bipolar cell (BC) axonal territories are either matched or unmatched. Despite this difference, in both circuits, the proportion of inputs from each BC type, i.e., synaptic convergence between specific BCs and RGCs, remained constant across varying dendritic territory sizes. Furthermore, synapse density between BCs and RGCs was invariant across topography. Our results demonstrate a wiring design, likely engaging homotypic axonal tiling of BCs, that ensures consistency in synaptic convergence between specific BC types onto their target RGCs while enabling independent regulation of pre- and postsynaptic territory sizes and synapse number between cell pairs