Enhancing the Supervision of Undergraduate Major Projects

Most undergraduate students are still required to complete a project of some kind, often in their final year of study. However, levels of student satisfaction on project modules and student outcomes are subject to considerable variation. Project modules sometimes detract from rather than add value to the student experience. Published research in the sector focused on best practice in the supervision of undergraduate projects and dissertations is limited. Using a case study approach, this article considers recent academic staff development interventions focused on enhancing supervision practice from a series of workshops and webinars organised by the authors. The analysis draws from existing module evaluation data, an in-session e-voting tool and end of session written evaluations. It considers the nuances of undergraduate supervision, the challenges that stem from cultural differences between disciplines, and the kinds of challenges faced by students and their supervisors. It argues that supervision at UG level constitutes a separate and distinctive aspect of HE pedagogic practice, and involves inducting the student into a different and often ‘alien’ approach to learning. It provides what the authors hope are some useful reflections on practice and proposes opportunities for developing practice of supervision more widely within the sector at undergraduate level

The value of 'writing retreats' in advancing innovative pedagogic research

This paper outlines the work of the Centre for Innovation in Higher Education, which uses an educational laboratory model to advance the intersection of innovative research and teaching at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). This evidence-based approach aims to promote active, reflective engagement with research in teaching and learning; foster collaborative and interdisciplinary inquiry into pedagogic practice; and support the development of a dynamic, sustainable pedagogic research community at ARU. The Centre’s work also increases the visibility and calibre of pedagogic research at national and international level. This paper outlines a current research project being undertaken by researchers from the Centre and Anglia Learning & Teaching which explores the longitudinal impact of its writing retreat provision on participants’ writing practices and productivity, together with their perceptions of writing as a key element of the academic identity. This study is generating valuable original data about academics’ writing practices and perceptions. It will contribute to the understanding of this important topic at a theoretical level, as well as outlining practical means through which universities can foster long-term academic writing productivity leading to enhanced research impact

The Impact of Pedagogic Research Writing Retreats on Participants’ Identities and Writing Habits

Writing for publication is a core activity in higher education. It serves many purposes including dissemination of good practice and the development of personal and institutional reputations. Writing is a practice that benefits from support and protected time away from the competing pressures of the ‘day job’, and one way of providing both of these is through writing retreats. In particular, pedagogic research writing retreats provide dedicated time and space to write, to develop new writing practices, and to foster a community of practice. They can be made available to both academic and professional staff. In this paper, we show how attendees learned new writing approaches and strategies such as recreating the retreat structure at home and developed and maintained a coherent and vibrant interdisciplinary community of practice within which they reframed their identities as academic writers

Building higher education curricula fit for the future: how higher education institutions are responding to the Industrial Strategy

The focus of the UK’s Industrial Strategy on supporting people to develop for jobs of the future, as well as how best to understand and articulate their employability development, speaks directly to effective learning and teaching in a Higher Education setting. If up to 70% of the anticipated 1.8 million new jobs in the UK that will be created between 2014 and 2024 will be in occupations most likely to employ graduates, then the career readiness and employability of students across all disciplines within HE will continue to grow in importance as an area of curriculum design and development. To better understand the relationship between the evolving economic terrain set out in the UK’s Industrial Strategy and the development of employability provision that will respond effectively to national needs, further research into the role HE plays in creating programmes of study that connect with this agenda was necessary. In commissioning this research, AdvanceHE set out to inform the sector’s understanding about how the vision detailed in the UK’s Industrial Strategy is articulated through approaches to learning and teaching in HE and to contribute to policy debates in this area around academic and technical qualifications. The research looks across discipline areas in order to provide deeper and richer insights into how employability and skills development are understood and developed within HE – identifying representative examples and case studies. The research focuses on the ways in which corresponding and connected terms function in this arena – such as competency, aptitude, proficiency and attribute – in order to scrutinise the language of employability. Through the project’s analysis of the employability landscape across discipline areas within HE, it also adds to the debates about a “national employability skills framework” and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Re-Examining the Value of UK University Business Studies Courses for Post- Graduation Nepalese Graduates

This research analyses the reflections of post-graduation Nepalese Business Studies undergraduate and postgraduate graduates from UK universities. It follows their return to Nepal, where the graduates were facing a scarcity of employment opportunities. The primary research was undertaken at a time when UK universities were facing increasing competition to recruit international students and numbers of Nepalese students choosing the UK were decreasing. The mixed methods research was based primarily on semi-structured interviews in Nepal with twenty-three Nepalese graduates, their Nepalese employers and Nepalese education consultancies. Data were analysed using the five systems model of Bronfenbrenner (1979) and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s (2012) Intercultural Awareness Profiling. Although the overall expectations of Nepalese students and employers towards UK higher education remained positive, results indicated a lowering estimation of the quality and reputation of UK universities and increasing Nepalese University and regional competition. The outcomes make a further contribution to the knowledge of why Nepalese students choose overseas higher education but why Nepalese employers are struggling to see clear benefits from employing UK educated Nepalese business graduates

Integration of energy and electron transfer processes in the photosynthetic membrane of Rhodobacter sphaeroides

Photosynthesis converts absorbed solar energy to a protonmotive force, which drives ATP synthesis. The membrane network of chlorophyll–protein complexes responsible for light absorption, photochemistry and quinol (QH2) production has been mapped in the purple phototrophic bacterium Rhodobacter (Rba.) sphaeroides using atomic force microscopy (AFM), but the membrane location of the cytochrome bc1 (cytbc1) complexes that oxidise QH2 to quinone (Q) to generate a protonmotive force is unknown. We labelled cytbc1 complexes with gold nanobeads, each attached by a Histidine10 (His10)-tag to the C-terminus of cytc1. Electron microscopy (EM) of negatively stained chromatophore vesicles showed that the majority of the cytbc1 complexes occur as dimers in the membrane. The cytbc1 complexes appeared to be adjacent to reaction centre light-harvesting 1-PufX (RC–LH1–PufX) complexes, consistent with AFM topographs of a gold-labelled membrane. His-tagged cytbc1 complexes were retrieved from chromatophores partially solubilised by detergent; RC–LH1–PufX complexes tended to co-purify with cytbc1 whereas LH2 complexes became detached, consistent with clusters of cytbc1 complexes close to RC–LH1–PufX arrays, but not with a fixed, stoichiometric cytbc1–RC–LH1–PufX supercomplex. This information was combined with a quantitative mass spectrometry (MS) analysis of the RC, cytbc1, ATP synthase, cytaa3 and cytcbb3 membrane protein complexes, to construct an atomic-level model of a chromatophore vesicle comprising 67 LH2 complexes, 11 LH1–RC–PufX dimers & 2 RC–LH1–PufX monomers, 4 cytbc1 dimers and 2 ATP synthases. Simulation of the interconnected energy, electron and proton transfer processes showed a half-maximal ATP turnover rate for a light intensity equivalent to only 1% of bright sunlight. Thus, the photosystem architecture of the chromatophore is optimised for growth at low light intensities

Formation of dense partonic matter in relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC: Experimental evaluation by the PHENIX collaboration

Extensive experimental data from high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions were recorded using the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The comprehensive set of measurements from the first three years of RHIC operation includes charged particle multiplicities, transverse energy, yield ratios and spectra of identified hadrons in a wide range of transverse momenta (p_T), elliptic flow, two-particle correlations, non-statistical fluctuations, and suppression of particle production at high p_T. The results are examined with an emphasis on implications for the formation of a new state of dense matter. We find that the state of matter created at RHIC cannot be described in terms of ordinary color neutral hadrons.Comment: 510 authors, 127 pages text, 56 figures, 1 tables, LaTeX. Submitted to Nuclear Physics A as a regular article; v3 has minor changes in response to referee comments. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htm

Longitudinal scaling property of the charge balance function in Au + Au collisions at 200 GeV

We present measurements of the charge balance function, from the charged particles, for diverse pseudorapidity and transverse momentum ranges in Au + Au collisions at 200 GeV using the STAR detector at RHIC. We observe that the balance function is boost-invariant within the pseudorapidity coverage [-1.3, 1.3]. The balance function properly scaled by the width of the observed pseudorapidity window does not depend on the position or size of the pseudorapidity window. This scaling property also holds for particles in different transverse momentum ranges. In addition, we find that the width of the balance function decreases monotonically with increasing transverse momentum for all centrality classes.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure