The Making of a MOOC: Reflections from the Journey!

The Making of a MOOC': Any relevance to "normal" learning and teaching? MOOCs (massive open online courses) are a hugely topical area of educational policy and practice. The University of Glasgow is developing two new courses in partnership with FutureLearn, a free, open, online platform for courses from multiple UK and international universities. The university will initially offer two courses, one from the School of Medicine and one from the School of Law, beginning in May/June 2014.'Cancer in the 21st Century: The Genomic Revolution' has been developed by the School of Medicine in collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Sciences. In this presentation we will provide an introduction to MOOCs and reflect on our own experiences in the development of the cancer genetics MOOC over the past year. Specific areas of potential relevance to traditional course design such as student retention, student engagement, peer-assisted learning and peer review will be considered. We will review our approach to course design and discuss how factors such as online accessibility, the size of the student cohort, and the varying levels of background knowledge amongst students have influenced our decision making process. The design of the student surveys for the course and how the data generated will impact our model of sustainability for the MOOC in future academic sessions will also be discussed

Heterogeneous agendas around public engagement in stem cell research:The case for maintaining plasticity

Although public engagement is now part of the business of doing science, there is considerable divergence about what the term means and what public engagement ought to be doing. This paper refl ects on these heterogeneous meanings and agendas through an analysis of focus group data from research on public engagement in stem cell research. Three broad visions of public engagement are identifi ed: as education and information provision; as dialogue; and as participation in policy making. In analysing the implications of these visions three dimensions are highlighted: weakly and strongly structured visions of public engagement; the co production of roles and relationships; and the framing of what is at stake. Each of these has the potential to include or exclude some groups in public engagement. We conclude that social scientists should seek to maintain the plasticity of public engagement as a necessary condition for greater participation and reflexivity in science policy, practice and governance

The Romani minority, coercive sterilization, and languages of denial in the Czech lands

Sterilizations of Romani women in socialist Czechoslovakia, either carried out without proper consent, or coerced through substantial financial incentive, were first reported in 1978. Yet these practices did not end with the fall of Communism, and it took until 2005 for this to be officially acknowledged by the Czech government. This article draws on published and unpublished documents, as well as oral history interviews, to trace the history of efforts to expose such practices, ‘come to terms’ with their existence, and change social attitudes in relation to the Romani minority in the Czech lands. These exposures have uncovered instances of denial, and have also offered up a variety of ways of understanding the mental and social mechanisms that might have enabled silences, refusals or disavowals with regard to human rights abuses. Under Communism, dissidents associated with Charter 77 elaborated these through the philosophical concepts of phenomenology; after the transition to democracy, a more psychological and therapeutic language came to the fore. I argue that the Czech case suggests that the historiography of denial and disavowal could be enriched by looking beyond the framework of psychoanalysis: by taking into account how historical actors, sometimes with opposing worldviews, have comprehended these processes within the languages of their own culture and period

Suggestion, persuasion and work: psychotherapies in Communist Europe

This article traces what recent research and primary sources tell us about psychotherapy in Communist Europe, and how it survived both underground and above the surface. In particular, I will elaborate on the psychotherapeutic techniques that were popular across the different countries and language cultures of the Soviet sphere, with a particular focus upon the Cold War period. This article examines the literature on the mixed fortunes of psychoanalysis and group therapies in the region. More specifically, it focuses upon the therapeutic modalities such as work therapy, suggestion and rational therapy, which gained particular popularity in the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The latter two approaches had striking similarities with parallel developments in behavioural and cognitive therapies in the West. In part, this was because clinicians on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’ drew upon shared European traditions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, this article argues that in the Soviet sphere, those promoting these approaches appropriated socialist thought as a source of inspiration and justification, or at the very least, as a convenient political shield

Playing the Numbers Game: Students as Assessors in a MOOC Context

With increasing focus on online platforms in learning and teaching, it is vital to examine how we can best assess students in the online context. The main rationale driving innovative assessment in MOOCs is the unprecedented scale of class sizes. While it may be logistically challenging for staff to mark/give feedback on the large number of student assignments, peers are plentiful. Assessment and feedback must therefore come either from automated processes, like MCQ quizzes or from other students i.e. peer review (PR). Our study was based on data from the 6-week MOOC ‘Cancer in the 21st Century: The Genomic Revolution’ on which there were >7000 students enrolled. Over 200 students took part in a PR task as part of the MOOC. The aim of our research was to investigate the quality of the PRs produced, what factors influence this and the students’ experience of the PR process. Demographic data (age, gender, previous level of education, whether students are currently employed and field of employment) was collected and linked to 79 students who had participated. Peer reviews were compared with staff marking of the written task and the demographic data was analysed in relation to both written task and peer review performance. Qualitative comments were also gathered from various forums and thematic analysis was carried out on these. Overall, many high quality reviews were generated, and students identified specific benefits to both receiving and giving reviews, including promoting deeper learning. We also found that while several demographic factors may influence both participation in, and quality of initial written task itself, they do not appear to have a marked effect on the quality of the peer review which an individual is able to give. We will discuss the implications of these results for use of PR in both online and offline environments

Mechanistic Studies of Human RNase H2

Single ribonucleotides are incorporated into DNA about every 2000 nucleotides during replication. If these ribonucleotides are not removed, they can lead to mutagenesis, strand breakage, and genome instability. To remove these ribonucleotides, the cell employs a process known as ribonucleotide excision repair (RER). RER begins with recognition of the ribonucleotide by RNase H2, which cleaves 5’ to the ribonucleotide. In prokaryotes and archaea, RNase HII is a monomer. In contrast, RNase H2 in eukaryotes is a heterotrimer. Mutations in all three of the genes for RNase H2 are associated with the autosomal recessive neurological disorder Aicardi-Goutières Syndrome (AGS). Although experiments have been done to explore the substrate requirements of RNase H2, many of these studies have been done with the monomeric proteins from prokaryotes and archaea. Additionally, there is limited kinetic characterization of the eukaryotic enzymes for different types of RNA-DNA hybrids. In Chapter 2, I examined the binding affinity and cleavage of human RNase H2 for a series of gapped and flapped substrates that may occur in the cell. From these studies, I found that RNase H2 binds most ribonucleotide containing substrates with a similar binding affinity but demonstrates severely different extents of cleavage. Additionally, as there are no crystal structures of eukaryotic RNase H2 in complex with an RNA-DNA hybrid, little is known about the protein-DNA conformations necessary for the initiation of RER. In Chapter 3 of this dissertation, I use atomic force microscopy to characterize the interactions of human RNase H2 with DNA containing a single ribonucleotide. From these studies, I have preliminarily shown that RNase H2 induces a 40o bend angle into non-specific sites in the DNA, which may be part of a searching mechanism for incorporated ribonucleotides. Additionally, I have observed that RNase H2 preferentially binds to intersecting strands of supercoiled DNA in the absence of a ribonucleotide.Doctor of Philosoph

Conditional expression in corticothalamic efferents reveals a developmental role for nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in modulation of passive avoidance behavior

Prenatal nicotine exposure has been linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and cognitive impairment, but the sites of action for these effects of nicotine are still under investigation. High-affinity nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) contain the .2 subunit and modulate passive avoidance (PA) learning in mice. Using an inducible, tetracycline-regulated transgenic system, we generated lines of mice with expression of high-affinity nicotinic receptors restored in specific neuronal populations. One line of mice shows functional .2 subunit-containing nAChRs localized exclusively in corticothalamic efferents. Functional, presynaptic nAChRs are present in the thalamus of these mice as detected by nicotine-elicited rubidium efflux assays from synaptosomes. Knock-out mice lacking high-affinity nAChRs show elevated baseline PA learning, whereas normal baseline PA behavior is restored in mice with corticothalamic expression of these nAChRs. In contrast, nicotine can enhance PA learning in adult wild-type animals but not in corticothalamic-expressing transgenic mice. When these transgenic mice are treated with doxycycline in adulthood to switch off nAChR expression, baseline PA is maintained even after transgene expression is abolished. These data suggest that high-affinity nAChRs expressed on corticothalamic neurons during development are critical for baseline PA performance and provide a potential neuroanatomical substrate for changes induced by prenatal nicotine exposure leading to long-term behavioral and cognitive deficits