FLIPPED LEARNING IN ELT: EXPERIENCES FROM OMAN

Background and Purpose: Recently, flipped learning has become prevalent as a teaching and learning approach in international educational settings. A commonly cited advantage is to do self-study at home and to spend valuable classroom time on meaningful interactive learning activities. After the start of Covid-19 pandemic, the sudden transition to online teaching required many institutions to adopt a flipped learning approach. The current study was conducted at one of such institutions, namely Dhofar University in Oman. The aim of this paper is to identify the challenges met by both teachers and students using flipped learning during this transition as well as the solutions they developed to cope with them.   Methodology: This study implemented a mixed methods design for which the data were collected from two questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. One questionnaire was for teachers with 14 responses while the other was for students and could obtain responses from 68 students from the target population. From the list of teacher respondents, 10 were interviewed for deeper discussion of flipped learning context. The Questionnaires results were statistically calculated and descriptively analysed, whereas the interviews were thematically scrutinized.   Findings: The researchers found several major challenges including increased workload, lack of training, resistance to change, lacking IT skills, technical issues, non-completion of homework tasks and non-participation in live sessions. Teachers' resilience in the face of these challenges was noteworthy; especially in the form of peer support groups. The suggestions made by the teaching faculty for solutions are reported and discussed in the relevant sections of the article with reference to various research studies from different contexts.   Contributions: Despite the small scale and the specific context of the study, the results and discussion provide useful food for thought to educational practitioners and decision makers in wider international contexts when it comes to flipped learning challenges and coping mechanisms.    Keywords: Flipped learning, ELT, challenges, solutions, higher education.   Cite as: Eissa, A., Yapar, O., & Abugohar, M. (2023). Flipped learning in ELT: Experiences from Oman. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(2), 180-200. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8iss2pp180-20

Disseminated angioinvasive basidiobolomycosis with a favourable outcome

Basidiobolomycosis, a rare fungal infection, is of worldwide distribution but areas commonly involved include the tropical areas of Africa, USA and South East Asia. 88% of the cases are reported among patients younger than 20 years. Many of the case reports in Saudi Arabia are from Tohama area where our patient lives. The diagnosis tends to be overlooked as the presentation may mimic colonic carcinoma in adults or inflammatory bowel diseases and tuberculosis in both children and adults. Angioinvasion seen in our patient is extremely rare suggesting the diagnosis of mucormycosis and resulting in a delay in choosing the most appropriate treatment. We report this case to remind physicians and surgeons to consider this diagnosis in patients from endemic area presenting with such conditions. Keywords: Zygomycetes, Basidiobolomycosis, Mucormycosis, Eosinophilia, Angioinvasio

Estimation of reduction of glomerular filtration rate in renal colic patients

Purpose: The aim of current study was to evaluate glomerular filtration rate (GFR) decline in patients with renal colic. Materials and methods: This descriptive analytical study was conducted on patients with definitive diagnosis of renal colic in university hospital of Sharjah. Data including gender, age, and underlying disease were extracted from medical records. GFR and creatinine level were assessed before and 3 months after stone excretion. Hydronephrosis severity was assessed by ultrasound procedure. Results: In current study, 224 patients with renal colic and mean age 45.6±11.35 years old were selected. The mean GFR before and 3 months after urinary stone excretion were 45.89±18.84 and 61.13±22.10 ml/minute, respectively (P<0.01). The mean creatinine at the beginning and 3 months after urinary stone excretion was 1.93±0.46 and 1.59±0.43 mg/dl, respectively (P<0.01). The most frequency of patients with different hydronephrosis degrees was related to score 3 (n=92). There was significant difference between hydronephrosis severity in terms of GFR (P=0.000). No significant difference was seen between the mean GFR at the beginning of the study and at 3 months after urinary stone excretion in terms of diabetes and hypertension (P>0.05). Conclusion: We observed significant difference between hydronephrosis severity in terms of GFR.&nbsp

Robustness and Unpredictability for Double Arbiter PUFs on Silicon Data: Performance Evaluation and Modeling Accuracy

Classical cryptographic methods that inherently employ secret keys embedded in non-volatile memory have been known to be impractical for limited-resource Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as an applicable solution to provide a keyless means for secure authentication. PUFs utilize inevitable variations of integrated circuits (ICs) components, manifest during the fabrication process, to extract unique responses. Double Arbiter PUFs (DAPUFs) have been recently proposed to overcome security issues in XOR PUF and enhance the tolerance of delay-based PUFs against modeling attacks. This paper provides comprehensive risk analysis and performance evaluation of all proposed DAPUF designs and compares them with their counterparts from XOR PUF. We generated different sets of real challenge–response pairs CRPs from three FPGA hardware boards to evaluate the performance of both DAPUF and XOR PUF designs using special-purpose evaluation metrics. We show that none of the proposed designs of DAPUF is strictly preferred over XOR PUF designs. In addition, our security analysis using neural network reveals the vulnerability of all DAPUF designs against machine learning attacks

Genetic polymorphisms of fecundity genes in Watish Sudanese desert sheep

Background and Aim: The Watish sheep is a strain of desert sheep of smaller size compared to other desert sheep ecotypes, and there is anecdotal evidence that it is endowed with high litter size. The present study was designed for screening for polymorphisms in the known fecundity genes (bone morphogenetic protein receptor type 1B A<G in exon 6, bone morphogenetic protein 15 (BMP15) (FecXB, FecXG, FecXH, and FecXI) in exon2, growth differentiation factor 9 (GDF9) – G1 in exon1 and G8 in exon2 and PRLG<A in intron2) and their association with litter size in Watish. Materials and Methods: The study involved 156 Watish ewes of 2-6 years of age, along with data on litter size in the first, second, and third parity from Sinnar state and contiguous Blue Nile State. Genomic DNA was isolated and genotyped using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism. Allele and genotype frequencies were calculated by direct counting. Chi-square test for goodness of fit was performed for agreement with Hardy-Weinberg expectations and association testing. Results: The results demonstrated that all individuals were non-carriers for the target mutations of FecB, BMP15 (FecXB, FecXH, and FecXI), and GDF9-G8. With regard to the GDF9-G1 gene, the genotypic frequencies were 0.07% (G+) and 0.93% (++), in FecXG gene they were 0.993% (++) and 0.006% (B+), in PRL gene 0.516(++), 0.347(B+), and 0.137(BB). The Chi-square test showed a non-significant association between ewe's type of birth and the detected mutations genotypes. Conclusion: These results preliminarily indicated that GDF9-G1, BMP15 (FecXG), and PRL genes might have had some contribution for improving litter size in Watish Sudanese sheep. However, further studies using larger samples are needed to detect the effects of those mutations on Watish sheep litter size