Evaluating Interactive teaching on conceptual understanding on medium enrolment classes

Interactive learning is increasingly being valued as an ideal environment that promotes critical thinking, conceptual understanding, intellectual development and success. The beneficial effects of interactive lectures though very well established for small classrooms are often debated for larger classes. My hypothesis is that interactive lectures can easily be introduced to large classrooms and that students’ engagement understanding and academic achievements can be greatly improved by constructively aligned interactive lectures. The purpose of my project is to evaluate the effect of interactive teaching on students’ engagement, conceptual understanding, as well as academic achievement and performance on medium enrolment(~55 students) classes. This is particular important for me as up to now I have been successfully implementing interactive lectures in small enrolment classes (<20 students) and now faced with the challenge to teach by myself a medium enrolment class (50 students) of the 2nd year students. To test my hypothesis I applied a series of actions on the course Nanobio 1 of the Nanoscience education some of which are shortly mentioned here: A) Interview with group of students after the end of the course. B) compare their understanding (using online tools) between subject taught using classical lecturing/preaching and subjects taught by interactive discussions C) compare students performance (grades) on subjects that are “preached” in theform of classical lectures, subject interactively discussed in the class and 338 Nikos S. Hatzakis subjects that are both interactively discussed and applied during practical exercises. My results showed a remarkable increase in correctly answering the exam question, from 45% for subjects only lectured to 70% for subjects interactively discussed and 87% for subjects interactive discussed and applied in practical exercises. Similarly online quizzes using Student Response Systems (SRS) like Socrative showed an increase from <30% to often more than 90% in students ability to apprehend and interactively discussed subject and correctly answer a multiple choice question when knowledge is attained in the form of interactive processing of information

Influence of Lipid Heterogeneity and Phase Behavior on Phospholipase A2 Action at the Single Molecule Level

We monitored the action of phospholipase A2 (PLA2) on L- and D-dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) Langmuir monolayers by mounting a Langmuir-trough on a wide-field fluorescence microscope with single molecule sensitivity. This made it possible to directly visualize the activity and diffusion behavior of single PLA2 molecules in a heterogeneous lipid environment during active hydrolysis. The experiments showed that enzyme molecules adsorbed and interacted almost exclusively with the fluid region of the DPPC monolayers. Domains of gel state L-DPPC were degraded exclusively from the gel-fluid interface where the build-up of negatively charged hydrolysis products, fatty acid salts, led to changes in the mobility of PLA2. The mobility of individual enzymes on the monolayers was characterized by single particle tracking (SPT). Diffusion coefficients of enzymes adsorbed to the fluid interface were between 3 mu m^2/s on the L-DPPC and 4.6 mu m^/s on the D-DPPC monolayers. In regions enriched with hydrolysis products the diffusion dropped to approx. 0.2 mu m^2/s. In addition, slower normal and anomalous diffusion modes were seen at the L-DPPC gel domain boundaries where hydrolysis took place. The average residence times of the enzyme in the fluid regions of the monolayer and on the product domain were between approx. 30 and 220 ms. At the gel domains it was below the experimental time resolution, i.e. enzymes were simply reflected from the gel domains back into solution.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

FRET-based dynamic structural biology: Challenges, perspectives and an appeal for open-science practices

Single-molecule FRET (smFRET) has become a mainstream technique for studying biomolecular structural dynamics. The rapid and wide adoption of smFRET experiments by an ever-increasing number of groups has generated significant progress in sample preparation, measurement procedures, data analysis, algorithms and documentation. Several labs that employ smFRET approaches have joined forces to inform the smFRET community about streamlining how to perform experiments and analyze results for obtaining quantitative information on biomolecular structure and dynamics. The recent efforts include blind tests to assess the accuracy and the precision of smFRET experiments among different labs using various procedures. These multi-lab studies have led to the development of smFRET procedures and documentation, which are important when submitting entries into the archiving system for integrative structure models, PDB-Dev. This position paper describes the current ‘state of the art’ from different perspectives, points to unresolved methodological issues for quantitative structural studies, provides a set of ‘soft recommendations’ about which an emerging consensus exists, and lists openly available resources for newcomers and seasoned practitioners. To make further progress, we strongly encourage ‘open science’ practices