Tele-Assessment of the Tele-Taught University Degree in Computer Science Engineering

Since 2001 all courses of a 3-year university degree in computer science engineering at the University of Padova are being taught in 4 geographically distributed sites using real-time simultaneous teleteaching technologies. The aim of the system is to deliver academic lessons to geographically distributed classrooms, preserving as much as possible the way the teacher communicates and interacts with students in a traditional classroom. The focus is on the quality assessment survey submitted to both students and teaching staff at the end of the (last) 3rd period. Objectives of the survey are: to assess the effectiveness of the lessons delivered with teleteaching modality; to get indications on the perceived quality of the tele-teaching technology, of classrooms, laboratories and services in the remote sites. An on-line questionnaire has been designed and is currently submitted to all the teachers and all the students attending these courses in the 4 sites. The Moodle environment has been adopted to create online courses integrated with the above mentioned teleteaching platform. All aspects concerned in the question of the survey have been statistically analyzed, and results report grouping data by enrolment year, site and role of the answering have been disseminated through the web site

Effectiveness assessment of tele-taught vs. traditional courses of a 3-year university degree in computer science engineering

This paper aims at perform an effectiveness assessment of tele-taught university courses, based on quantitative data regarding fully cohortes of students. The assessment works up by analyzing grades coming from the traditional and tele-taught courses to bring out differences in objective effectiveness of both the methodologies. Since more than 5 years, all courses of a 3-year University degree in Computer Science Engineering at the University of Padua have been taught in 4 geographically distributed sites using real-time simultaneous tele-teaching technologies. Main differences between tele-taught and traditional lessons are: exploitation of new technologies (distributed network infrastructures, high quality multimedia transmission, etc.); the number of students attending in teleteaching classrooms are fewer than the traditional ones; and the tutor presence, who helps and supports students with practice sessions. The paper begins with the description of the tele-teaching platform and the teaching approach, because the roles of both teaching people and technolgies underlie the assessment analysis. On this background the methodology of the assessment is described and finally the analysis. Results highlight the same effectiveness of both tele-taught and traditional lessons: performance differences among students are mainly due to their high school of origin. The experience at University of Padua reveals the soundness of its own teleteaching approach in order to fulfill the needs of commuter students, saving the daily travel time from home to University main site

Chromogenic and fluorogenic glycosylated and acetylglycosylated peptides as substrates for serine, thiol and aspartyl proteases

We synthesized short chromogenic peptidyl-Arg-p-nitroanilides containing either (Gal beta)Ser or (Glc alpha,beta)Tyr at P-2 or P-3 sites as well as O-acetylated sugar moieties and studied their hydrolysis by bovine trypsin, papain, human tissue kallikrein and rat tonin. for comparison, the susceptibility to these enzymes of Acetyl-X-Arg-pNa and Acetyl-X-Phe-Arg-pNa series, in which X was Ala, Phe, Gin and Asn were examined. We also synthesized internally quenched fluorescent peptides with the amino acid sequence Phe(8)-His-Leu-Val-Ile-His-Asn(14) of hu man angiotensinogen, in which [GlcNAc beta]Asn was introduced before Phe(8) and/or after His(13) and ortho-aminobenzoic acid (Abz) and N-[2-, 4-dinitrophenyl]-ethylenediamine (EDDnp) were attached at N- and C-terminal ends as a donor/receptor fluorescent pair. These peptides were examined as substrates for human renin, human cathepsin D and porcine pepsin. the chromogenic substrates with hydrophilic sugar moiety increased their susceptibility to trypsin, tissue kallikrein and rat tonin. for papain, the effect of sugar depends on its position in the substrate, namely, at P-3 it is unfavorable, in contrast to the P-2 position that resulted in increasing affinity, as demonstrated by the higher inhibitory activity of Ac-(Gal beta)Ser-Arg-pNa in comparison to Ac-Ser-Arg-pNa, and by the hydrolysis of Ac-(Glc alpha,beta)Tyr-Arg-pNa. On the other hand, the acetylation of sugar hydroxyl groups improved hydrolysis of the susceptible peptides to all enzymes, except tonin. the P-4', glycosylated peptide [Abz-F-H-L-V-I-H-(GlcNAc beta)N-E-EDDnp], that corresponds to one of the natural glycosylation sites of angiotensinogen, was shown to be the only glycosylated substrate susceptible to human renin, and was hydrolysed with lower K-m and higher k(cat) values than the same peptide without the sugar moiety. Human cathepsin D and porcine pepsin are more tolerant to substrate glycosylation, hydrolysing both the P-4' and P-4 glycosylated substrates.Escola Paulista Med, Dept Biofis, BR-04044020 São Paulo, BrazilUniv Padua, Dept Organ Chem, CNR, Biopolymer Res Ctr, I-35131 Padua, ItalyEscola Paulista Med, Dept Biofis, BR-04044020 São Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc