Foiling the free riders: early experience with compulsory peer assessment at an online business school

Getting students to work in teams is a tried and tested mechanism for promoting active learning (Kadel & Keehner 1994). Team work, and the ability to work in teams, is also becoming increasingly valued in the world of business and commerce (Senge 1990). The question is: to what extent should assessment be tied to the collaborative efforts of teams? Generally speaking, opinion seems to be divided among those students who hate it and those who think it is extremely valuable. Those who find it a chore invariably complain about difficult personalities and those who ‘free ride’ off the efforts of others. This, of course, is no different to life in the real world and one might argue, therefore, that it is an authentic learning experience! A counter-argument is that, in the real world, there is also likely to be a reporting system within an organisation whereby the difficult and the lazy people are prevented from prospering beyond the short term. This paper reports on the first 12 months’ experience of a compulsory peer assessment system that represents a modest attempt to install such a reporting system, with the goal of calling the free-riders to account. It details the implementation process, teething problems, successes to date, and future research plans

Dynamics of the IRE RNA hairpin loop probed by 2-aminopurine fluorescence and stochastic dynamics simulations

The iron responsive element (IRE) RNA hairpin loop contains six phylogenetically conserved nucleotides, which constitute part of the sequence-specific binding site of the IRE-binding protein. The NMR structure of the loop has been solved, showing that 3 of the 6 nt are poorly constrained. Here, two purine nucleotides in the IRE loop are individually replaced with the fluorescent purine analog 2-aminopurine (2AP). Steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence methods are used to describe the structure and dynamics of 2AP in the IRE loop. The data indicate that 2AP at the position of the adenosine in the loop moves between stacked and unstacked positions, whereas 2AP at the adjacent guanosine is predominantly solvent exposed. Stochastic dynamics simulations are used to provide a physical description of how those nucleotides might move

Poverty Alleviation Through Access to Education: Can E-Learning Deliver?

Access to education has long been considered an important vehicle for poverty alleviation and tremendous efforts (national as well as international) have been made to broaden such access in LDCs. The ICT revolution in the past decade has greatly facilitated such efforts as education can now be provided to millions living in inaccessible (rural, mountainous, or landlocked) areas at the click of a mouse and at a relatively low cost without compromising quality. The webbased mode of education, popularly known as e-learning , has the capacity to make the acquisition of human capital cheaper and easier in poverty-ridden LDCs. Also, e-learning eliminates the human capital \u27bootstrapping problem\u27 by guaranteeing \u27just-in-time\u27 training of a superior quality at employees\u27 fingertips (literally and metaphorically!) It also has the potential to help reduce poverty by empowerment of the socially disadvantaged and less privileged in society including lower-income groups, the handicapped, sick and disabled (particularly those with writing, speaking and hearing impairments), members of ethnic minority groups, and women affected by cultural and religious prejudice. This is possible largely because, as this paper argues, physical location or ability is not critical for successful e-learning. The authors canvass all of these issues before proposing a new model for the optimal level of education in developing countries

Real Problems with Virtual Teams: An Analysis of the Factors Leading to Dysfunctional Online Collaboration

In online education, virtual teams play an important role in collaborative and peer learning. Unlike traditional face-to-face teams, the students in a virtual team may be geographically distributed, work in different time zones, and may never physically meet face-to-face. Universitas 21 Global, one of the new breed of online universities, has incorporated the use of virtual teams in its pedagogy since the inception of its MBA programme in August 2003. In their capacity as lead instructors, whose role it is to oversee the smooth running of individual class sections, the researchers report on some of the problems that have been observed with virtual teams

A Theoretical Framework for Effective Online Learning

A key, overarching goal for any committed educator is to ensure that the learner has a meaningful and memorable learning experience while achieving the desired learning outcomes. In this paper it is argued that in order to achieve such a goal, a strategy needs to be put in place that is capable of providing students with a fully integrated, all-encompassing learning environment. The reasoning, simply, is that learning will not necessarily emanate from one specific source and when it happens, it will occur through different means, for different people. One of the great strengths of the online learning space is that, harnessing the power of the various information and communication technologies (ICTs), there is greater scope for catering for individual learning needs. With this in mind, the paper puts forward a framework that comprises a number of overlapping \u27sub-environments\u27 which, together, provide the scaffolding considered essential for the construction of a truly holistic learning environment. To illustrate how this framework for effective online learning can be operationalised, the authors refer to the case of Universitas 21 Global, an institution which offers completely online programs to post-graduate students in more than 40 countries around the world

Using digital storytelling as an assessment instrument: preliminary findings at an online university

‘Digital Storytelling’ is a term often used to refer to a number of different types of digital narrative including web-based stories, hypertexts, videoblogs and computer games. While the definition of digital storytelling is still evolving, this emergent form of creative work has found an outlet in a wide variety of different domains ranging from community social history, to cookbooks, to the classroom. It is the latter domain that provides the focus for this paper, specifically the online classroom in the graduate business school environment. The authors hypothesise that as – in the majority of societies – people are ‘hard wired’ both to tell and to listen to stories from a very young age and, significantly, to remember stories, the scope for deep learning using this particular pedagogical tool is considerable. The more conservative forces within business schools may not be persuaded by this idea but – whether they are or not – the fact remains that, in the knowledge economy, digital technologies have become the modus operandi for business communication. In this sense, a business school curriculum with a heavy bias towards textbased, essay-style assignments might be adjudged out-of-step with the times. A supplementary hypothesis, therefore, is that digital storytelling also represents a highly authentic form of assessment (Herrington et al. 2003), in that the digital storytelling format improves presentation skills which are highly sought in the business world today. Much of the work on digital storytelling in the education sphere has concentrated on the primary and secondary sectors. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Paull 2002), the literature on digital storytelling in the tertiary/adult education sector is quite sparse. Research on the use of digital storytelling in business schools, meanwhile, appears non-existent, hence the motivation for this study

Weed control and overstory reduction improve survival and growth of under‐planted oak and hickory seedlings

Weed control and overstory reduction are important silvicultural treatments for improving survival and growth of under‐planted oak and hickory seedlings. Mast‐producing trees in the bottomland forests of the blackland prairie and Post Oak Savannah ecoregions of Texas have declined in abundance. Oaks and hickories have been replaced by more shade‐tolerant species, including green ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica Marshall) and sugarberry (Celtis laevigata Willd.), which do not produce significant hard mast for priority wildlife species. A split‐plot experiment design was installed on three sites at Richland Creek Wildlife Management Area in Freestone County, Texas, studying the effects of canopy coverage and competition control on survival and growth of bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa Michx.), Shumard oak (Quercus shumardii Buckl.), and pecan (Carya illinoinensis (Wagenh.) K. Koch) seedlings. Uprooting by hogs shortly after planting resulted in greater than 90% mortality of pecan on the two lower elevation sites. Year one survival of Shumard oak was significantly higher than bur oak. However, bur oak was more preferred by hogs than Shumard oak. Year one growth of bur oak was significantly greater than Shumard oak. Severe flooding during the second growing season caused complete mortality on the lower two sites. None of the species were well suited to such prolonged (3–4 months) inundation as seedlings. On the remaining site, density reduction and weed‐barrier mats improved growth and survival while herbaceous weed control with herbicides actually reduced both growth and survival

Leveraging HPC Profiling & Tracing Tools to Understand the Performance of Particle-in-Cell Monte Carlo Simulations

Large-scale plasma simulations are critical for designing and developing next-generation fusion energy devices and modeling industrial plasmas. BIT1 is a massively parallel Particle-in-Cell code designed for specifically studying plasma material interaction in fusion devices. Its most salient characteristic is the inclusion of collision Monte Carlo models for different plasma species. In this work, we characterize single node, multiple nodes, and I/O performances of the BIT1 code in two realistic cases by using several HPC profilers, such as perf, IPM, Extrae/Paraver, and Darshan tools. We find that the BIT1 sorting function on-node performance is the main performance bottleneck. Strong scaling tests show a parallel performance of 77% and 96% on 2,560 MPI ranks for the two test cases. We demonstrate that communication, load imbalance and self-synchronization are important factors impacting the performance of the BIT1 on large-scale runs.Comment: Accepted by the Euro-Par 2023 workshops (TDLPP 2023), prepared in the standardized Springer LNCS format and consists of 12 pages, which includes the main text, references, and figure

Capitalist Development Without 'Westernisation'? The Political Economy of Inequality in Singapore

This study sets out to expose the deficiencies of the orthodox analysis of capitalist development. In particular, it takes issue with the World Bank's 'East Asian Miracle' report (World Bank 1993), which claims that capitalist development in East Asia has produced relatively equal outcomes. The focus for this study is Singapore, arguably the most successful of the East Asian newly-industrialised countries. Evidence is submitted which shows that rapid economic growth has not caused Singapore society to become more equal as claimed by the World Bank. Moreover, unlike other capitalist nations at a similar stage in their development, the authorities are quite resolute in their rejection of so-called Western liberal solutions to the problem. Instead, the strategy has been to appeal to citizens' 'Asian values' in a bid to head off what are considered the morally and financially bankrupt practices of the welfare state. This thesis rejects the idea that there is a cultural solution to inequality, and argues that the Asian values theme is part of an ideological formulation devised by the Singapore Government in an attempt to legitimate its authoritarian rule

Cognitive tests used in chronic adult human randomised controlled trial micronutrient and phytochemical intervention studies

In recent years there has been a rapid growth of interest in exploring the relationship between nutritional therapies and the maintenance of cognitive function in adulthood. Emerging evidence reveals an increasingly complex picture with respect to the benefits of various food constituents on learning, memory and psychomotor function in adults. However, to date, there has been little consensus in human studies on the range of cognitive domains to be tested or the particular tests to be employed. To illustrate the potential difficulties that this poses, we conducted a systematic review of existing human adult randomised controlled trial (RCT) studies that have investigated the effects of 24 d to 36 months of supplementation with flavonoids and micronutrients on cognitive performance. There were thirty-nine studies employing a total of 121 different cognitive tasks that met the criteria for inclusion. Results showed that less than half of these studies reported positive effects of treatment, with some important cognitive domains either under-represented or not explored at all. Although there was some evidence of sensitivity to nutritional supplementation in a number of domains (for example, executive function, spatial working memory), interpretation is currently difficult given the prevailing 'scattergun approach' for selecting cognitive tests. Specifically, the practice means that it is often difficult to distinguish between a boundary condition for a particular nutrient and a lack of task sensitivity. We argue that for significant future progress to be made, researchers need to pay much closer attention to existing human RCT and animal data, as well as to more basic issues surrounding task sensitivity, statistical power and type I error