325 research outputs found
Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are freely available and openly licensed. Repositories of OER (ROER) are platforms that host and facilitate access to these resources. ROER should not just be designed to store this content â in keeping with the aims of the OER movement, they should support educators in embracing open educational practices (OEP) such as searching for and retrieving content that they will reuse, adapt or modify as needed, without economic barriers or copyright restrictions. This paper reviews key literature on OER and ROER, in order to understand the roles ROER are said or supposed to fulfil in relation to furthering the aims of the OER movement. Four themes which should shape repository design are identified, and the following 10 quality indicators (QI) for ROER effectiveness are discussed: featured resources; user evaluation tools; peer review; authorship of the resources; keywords of the resources; use of standardised metadata; multilingualism of the repositories; inclusion of social media tools; specification of the creative commons license; availability of the source code or original files. These QI form the basis of a method for the evaluation of ROER initiatives which, in concert with considerations of achievability and long-term sustainability, should assist in enhancement and development.
Keywords: open educational resources; open access; open educational practice; repositories; quality assuranc
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Shortwave spectral radiative signatures and their physical controls
The spectrum of reflected solar radiation emerging at the top of the atmosphere is rich with Earth system information. To identify spectral signatures in the reflected solar radiation and directly relate them to the underlying physical properties controlling their structure, over 90,000 solar reflectance spectra are computed over West Africa in 2010 using a fast radiation code employing the spectral characteristics of the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartographY (SCIAMACHY). Cluster analysis applied to the computed spectra reveals spectral signatures related to distinct surface properties, and cloud regimes distinguished by their spectral short-wave cloud radiative effect (SWCRE). The cloud regimes exhibit a diverse variety of mean broadband SWCREs, and offer an alternative approach to define cloud type for SWCRE applications that does not require any prior assumptions. The direct link between spectral signatures and distinct physical properties extracted from clustering remains robust between spatial scales of 1, 20 and 240 km, and presents an excellent opportunity to understand the underlying properties controlling real spectral reflectance observations. Observed SCIAMACHY spectra are assigned to the calculated spectral clusters, showing that cloud regimes are most frequent during the active West African monsoon season of JuneâOctober in 2010, and all cloud regimes have a higher frequency of occurrence during the active monsoon season of 2003 compared with the inactive monsoon season of 2004. Overall, the distinct underlying physical properties controlling spectral signatures show great promise for monitoring evolution of the Earth system directly from solar spectral reflectance observations
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Open Educational Practices
Open educational practices (OEP) is an umbrella term that includes the creation, use, and reuse of open educational resources (OER); pedagogical practices encouraging peer learning, collaborative knowledge creation, sharing, and empowerment of learners; and systemic and structural initiatives to support and embed openness. The underlying values of OEP match those of open education more broadly, i.e. enabling educational access, ensuring inclusivity, and furthering equity. Examples of OEP include using OER, renewable/non-disposable assignments (where students publish work openly), collaborative annotation, Wikipedia editing, open courses, and engaging in open learning/teaching communities, among many others. Some people use the terms 'OEP' and 'open pedagogy' interchangeably, while others consider OEP to be a broader concept, inclusive of open pedagogy, as the latter focuses primarily on teaching practices (see Open Pedagogy). OEP can be enacted at the level of individual artifacts, modules or programs (via OER, open pedagogy, open textbooks, open learning design) as well as systemically across institutional structures (via open education policies, open publishing practices, reward/recognition structures). Recent OEP research focuses on the importance of critical and social justice approaches, reflecting wider trends in digital and higher education. Such approaches acknowledge the importance of context and power relations and encourage diverse, inclusive, and equitable approaches to openness
Chemical probing of thiotetronate bio-assembly
Chemical âchain terminationâ probes were utilised for the investigation of thiotetronate antibiotic biosynthesis in the filamentous bacteria Lentzea sp. and Streptomyces thiolactonus NRRL 15439. The use of these tools led to the capture of biosynthetic intermediates involved in the thiotetronate polyketide backbone assembly, providing first insights into substrate specificity and in vivo intermediate processing by unusual iterative synthases
Local multiresolution order in community detection
Community detection algorithms attempt to find the best clusters of nodes in
an arbitrary complex network. Multi-scale ("multiresolution") community
detection extends the problem to identify the best network scale(s) for these
clusters. The latter task is generally accomplished by analyzing community
stability simultaneously for all clusters in the network. In the current work,
we extend this general approach to define local multiresolution methods, which
enable the extraction of well-defined local communities even if the global
community structure is vaguely defined in an average sense. Toward this end, we
propose measures analogous to variation of information and normalized mutual
information that are used to quantitatively identify the best resolution(s) at
the community level based on correlations between clusters in
independently-solved systems. We demonstrate our method on two constructed
networks as well as a real network and draw inferences about local community
strength. Our approach is independent of the applied community detection
algorithm save for the inherent requirement that the method be able to identify
communities across different network scales, with appropriate changes to
account for how different resolutions are evaluated or defined in a particular
community detection method. It should, in principle, easily adapt to
alternative community comparison measures.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure
correction novel chemical probes for the investigation of nonribosomal peptide assembly
Correction for 'Novel chemical probes for the investigation of nonribosomal peptide assembly' by Y. T. Candace Ho et al., Chem. Commun., 2017, 53, 7088â7091
Knowledge Integration and Diffusion: Measures and Mapping of Diversity and Coherence
I present a framework based on the concepts of diversity and coherence for
the analysis of knowledge integration and diffusion. Visualisations that help
understand insights gained are also introduced. The key novelty offered by this
framework compared to previous approaches is the inclusion of cognitive
distance (or proximity) between the categories that characterise the body of
knowledge under study. I briefly discuss the different methods to map the
cognitive dimension
World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the role of geography in science
Modern information and communication technologies, especially the Internet,
have diminished the role of spatial distances and territorial boundaries on the
access and transmissibility of information. This has enabled scientists for
closer collaboration and internationalization. Nevertheless, geography remains
an important factor affecting the dynamics of science. Here we present a
systematic analysis of citation and collaboration networks between cities and
countries, by assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors'
affiliations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between
cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws. In
addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount
of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact
reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may
reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more
than about 100,000 USD per researcher annually.Comment: Published version. 9 pages, 5 figures + Appendix, The world citation
and collaboration networks at both city and country level are available at
http://becs.aalto.fi/~rajkp/datasets.htm
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