Programme Design for Online Learning Environment Stories from Designing and Developing the New Zealand Certificate in Early Childhood Education and Care Level 4 Programme

The New Zealand Certificate in Early Childhood Education and Care Level 4 programme was designed and developed in the context of a Level 4 early childhood education qualification becoming a requirement for educators in home-based sector, and the Open Polytechnic transformation. The programme is delivered fully online. This paper is to share our stories of designing and developing the programme. The stories focus on pedagogy that empowers learners in an online flexible distance learning environment, our innovative of team work, and initial feedback from stakeholders. The pedagogy is underpinned by the integration of sociocultural and constructivist theories with information communication technology (ICT), specified by the CSI Model (The Pedagogic Model of Integrating Constructivist and Sociocultural Learning Principles with Information Communication Technology), the key educational design principles and the assessment approach. Based on the pedagogy, the programme was created in two phases: Design and development. The work of the first phase was on designing at a programme level while the work of the second phase was on developing the three courses of the programme. With the pedagogy and innovative team work, initial feedback from stakeholders was very positive. It is recommended that feedback from stakeholders is formally collected later this year and in the new year

Weighted instance based learner (WIBL) for user profiling

With an increase in web-based products and services, user profiling has created opportunities for both businesses and other organizations to provide a channel for user awareness as well as to achieve high user satisfaction. Apart from traditional collaborative and content-based methods, a number of classification and clustering algorithms have been used for user profiling. Instance Based Learner (IBL) classifier is a comprehensive form of the Nearest Neighbour (NN) algorithm and it is suitable for user profiling as users with similar profiles are likely to share similar personal interests and preferences. In IBL every attribute has an equal effect on the classification regardless of their relevance. In this paper, we proposed a weighted classification method, namely Weighted Instance Based Learner (WIBL), to build and handle user profiles. With WIBL, we introduce Per Category Feature (PCF) method to IBL in order to distinguish the effect of attributes on classification. PCF is an attribute weighting method and it assigns weights to attributes using conditional probabilities. The direct use of this method with IBL is not possible. Hence, two possible solutions were also proposed to address this problem. This study is aimed to test the performance of WIBL for user profiling. To validate the performance of WIBL, a series of computer simulations were carried out. These simulations were conducted using a large user profile database that includes 5000 training and 1000 test instances (users). Here, each user is represented with three sets of profile information; demographic, interest and preference data. The results illustrate that WIBL with PCF methods performs better than IBL on user profiling by reducing the error up to 28% on the selected dataset

Synthesis, identification, and biological characterisation of sterol transport protein inhibitors

Sterol transport proteins (STPs) are an important class of proteins performing an integral role in a range of cellular processes including cholesterol homeostasis, vesicular and non-vesicular trafficking, and regulating organelle contact sites. Despite their importance, the identification of selective modulators of STPs has proved challenging, owing to the high degree of structural similarity in their sterol binding domains. To overcome this challenge, an approach was developed to synthesise a screening collection of sterol-inspired compounds enriched in hits against STPs. By fusing a representative steroidal scaffold to a series of heterocyclic scaffolds, a collection of 65 sterol-inspired compounds were prepared for use in screening.The relevance of the sterol-inspired compound collection in affording selective hits against STPs was demonstrated by screening against the Aster family of STPs (Asters-A, -B, and –C) using a combination of differential scanning fluorimetry (DSF), fluorescence polarisation (FP), and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based assays. Hit compounds were identified and validated against Aster-A and Aster-C which after further optimisation resulted in the discovery of a new chemotype of Aster-A inhibitor, Asterpyrin-1, and the most potent and selective inhibitor of Aster-C known to date, Astercin-2. Finally, the inhibitors were used to investigate Aster-related biology in a cellular setting, revealing differential effects on the levels and localisation of cholesterol and cholesterol esters, and demonstrating the utility of these sterol-inspired compounds as tool compounds