Future Proof and Real-World Ready: The Role of Live Project-Based Learning in Students’ Skill Development

The rapid pace of technological change taking place today makes it even more important for marketing educators to incorporate relevant technical and higher level meta-skills in their digital marketing courses. We review the pedagogical literature on skill development and project-based learning and detail two live course projects designed to help students develop technical skills related to digital marketing in addition to important meta-skills involving creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. We evaluate the impact of the projects through a direct and indirect assessment process. Findings suggest that live project–based learning can support the development of the technical and meta-skills necessary for students to adapt to uncertainty and ambiguity and become future proof and real-world ready as they enter the workforce. We discuss the benefits and challenges associated with moving digital marketing education from conceptual to real-life projects and highlight pedagogical recommendations for educators who want to integrate live project-based learning into their courses

日本の特別なニーズのある外国籍生徒のためのインクルーシブ教育 : The Maximizing Potential in Japan International Academy による取組

日本の公立学校への入学を希望する外国人の子供は、国際人権規約およびその他の協定に基づいて無料で受け入れられる。しかし、こうした子供たちへの教育は義務ではない。文部科学省（2019）は、日本の義務教育を受ける資格のある外国人の子供の19,654人（15.9％）が小学校や中学校に通っていないことを明らかにした。彼らの一部は、家族が十分に裕福である、または、両親の雇用主が子供たちをインターナショナルスクールに送るための授業料に資金を提供している場合、インターナショナルスクールに行くことがある可能性がある。具体的には、障害のある外国人の子供の場合、良いリソースを見つけることは困難である。もちろん全国には1,135の特別支援学校や60,190の特別支援学級、それから5,283校に通級指導教室が設置されており、保護者がこれらの学校、学級、教室に相談できるようになっている。しかし、言語や文化の壁により、障害や特別なニーズのある子供をもつ多くの親は、子供を日本の学校に連れて行くことをためらう。したがって、The MaximizingPotential in Japan International Academy のような私立の学校や教育施設は、こうした家族に対して特に重要な役割を果たしている。本稿では、留学生に対する日本の特別支援教育制度の現状を紹介する。次に、TheMaximizing Potential in Japan International Academy によるアプローチを紹介する。最後に、障害や特別なニーズのある外国人の子供に質の高い教育を提供するための在り方について述べる。The purpose of this manuscript is to introduce the practice of Maximizing Potential in Japan International Academy, a private educational facility that provides education for disabled foreign children in English, in Japan. The number of children in need of special education in Japan continues to increase. In addition, the number of foreign national children who need Japanese language instruction is also increasing. From this situation, it is not difficult to imagine the increase of foreign children with disabilities; however, the actual number is not clear yet. In the future, schools will be required to handle children who need both Japanese and special needs. Hoping that the practice introduced in this study will help to consider the way of support in Japanese schools, the report of the authors’ observation at Maximizing Potential in Japan International Academy and the interview with the teachers there are introduced. Maximizing Potential in Japan International Academy values“ Playful learning,” which offers music, arts, crafts, and movement in addition to academic learning throughout the day, for those who like to move about on a regular basis. A wide variety of manipulative are also available, and their uses are three-fold: addressing sensory needs, kinesthetic/ tactile learning reasons

Quantum Mechanics on Moduli Spaces

It has been assumed that it is possible to approximate the interactions of quantized BPS solitons by quantising a dynamical system induced on a moduli space of soliton parameters. General properties of the reduction of quantum systems by a Born-Oppenheimer approximation are described here and applied to sigma models and their moduli spaces in order to learn more about this approximation. New terms arise from the reduction proceedure, some of them geometrical and some of them dynamical in nature. The results are generalised to supersymmetric sigma models, where most of the extra terms vanish.Comment: 19 pages, REVTe

The relationship between self-awareness of attentional status, behavioral performance and oscillatory brain rhythms

High-level cognitive factors, including self-awareness, are believed to play an important role in human visual perception. The principal aim of this study was to determine whether oscillatory brain rhythms play a role in the neural processes involved in self-monitoring attentional status. To do so we measured cortical activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants were asked to self-monitor their internal status, only initiating the presentation of a stimulus when they perceived their attentional focus to be maximal. We employed a hierarchical Bayesian method that uses fMRI results as soft-constrained spatial information to solve the MEG inverse problem, allowing us to estimate cortical currents in the order of millimeters and milliseconds. Our results show that, during self-monitoring of internal status, there was a sustained decrease in power within the 7-13 Hz (alpha) range in the rostral cingulate motor area (rCMA) on the human medial wall, beginning approximately 430 msec after the trial start (p < 0.05, FDR corrected). We also show that gamma-band power (41-47 Hz) within this area was positively correlated with task performance from 40-640 msec after the trial start (r = 0.71, p < 0.05). We conclude: (1) the rCMA is involved in processes governing self-monitoring of internal status; and (2) the qualitative differences between alpha and gamma activity are reflective of their different roles in self-monitoring internal states. We suggest that alpha suppression may reflect a strengthening of top-down interareal connections, while a positive correlation between gamma activity and task performance indicates that gamma may play an important role in guiding visuomotor behavior. © 2013 Yamagishi et al

A Large Genome-Wide Association Study of Age-Related Hearing Impairment Using Electronic Health Records

Age-related hearing impairment (ARHI), one of the most common sensory disorders, can be mitigated, but not cured or eliminated. To identify genetic influences underlying ARHI, we conducted a genome-wide association study of ARHI in 6,527 cases and 45,882 controls among the non-Hispanic whites from the Genetic Epidemiology Research on Adult Health and Aging (GERA) cohort. We identified two novel genome-wide significant SNPs: rs4932196 (odds ratio = 1.185, p = 4.0x10-11), 52Kb 3’ of ISG20, which replicated in a meta-analysis of the other GERA race/ethnicity groups (1,025 cases, 12,388 controls, p = 0.00094) and in a UK Biobank case-control analysis (30,802 self-reported cases, 78,586 controls, p = 0.015); and rs58389158 (odds ratio = 1.132, p = 1.8x10-9), which replicated in the UK Biobank (p = 0.00021). The latter SNP lies just outside exon 8 and is highly correlated (r2 = 0.96) with the missense SNP rs5756795 in exon 7 of TRIOBP, a gene previously associated with prelingual nonsyndromic hearing loss. We further tested these SNPs in phenotypes from audiologist notes available on a subset of GERA (4,903 individuals), stratified by case/control status, to construct an independent replication test, and found a significant effect of rs58389158 on speech reception threshold (SRT; overall GERA meta-analysis p = 1.9x10-6). We also tested variants within exons of 132 other previously-identified hearing loss genes, and identified two common additional significant SNPs: rs2877561 (synonymous change in ILDR1, p = 6.2x10-5), which replicated in the UK Biobank (p = 0.00057), and had a significant GERA SRT (p = 0.00019) and speech discrimination score (SDS; p = 0.0019); and rs9493627 (missense change in EYA4, p = 0.00011) which replicated in the UK Biobank (p = 0.0095), other GERA groups (p = 0.0080), and had a consistent significant result for SRT (p = 0.041) and suggestive result for SDS (p = 0.081). Large cohorts with GWAS data and electronic health records may be a useful method to characterize the genetic architecture of ARHI

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Additional file 2: Figure S1. of Comparative genomics of Enterococcus spp. isolated from bovine feces

Organisation of protein coding genes by Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COGs) category. (PNG 731 kb