CHALLENGES AND TRIUMPHS OF BUILDING ONLINE LEARNING COMMUNITIES WITH STUDENTS FROM DIVERSE DISCIPLINES AND BACKGROUNDS

PROBLEM Fully online general education courses can be challenging to teach due to their asynchronous nature. The students have different expectations, and it can be difficult to feel part of a learning community and be engaged and motivated without synchronous class activities. PLAN Group-based activities can help students form connections with each other and be a good foundation for fostering ongoing online learning communities. ACTION Big Fat Myths is offered by the Faculty of Science at University of New South Wales, with enrolments over 400 students. This course is offered to students from all year levels and faculties and consists of a large cohort of international students. In 2021, a group project was introduced and conducted via Microsoft Teams to provide students with peer learning opportunities and teach them how to effectively work in a group. REFLECTION The weekly group activities have helped students form connections and have increased awareness of diversity present in the course. Group-based learning can be highly effective as students achieve better results when they master a skill together than individually. An anonymous survey was conducted where students had to rate their experience using a five tiered Likert scale. Out of 80 responses, 78% of students agreed that they learned how to work effectively in a group and 64% of students agreed that they learned new skills from their group members

Structured Land Domain Modeling for Sustainable Land Administration in Sri Lanka

Developing countries face challenges in identifying suitable land due to insufficient administration systems, leading to governance issues and economic decline. A well-functioning land administration system is crucial for development. This technical paper elaborates an easy pathway to develop a local land administration Domains toward an effective and efficient Land Administration. Introduction of Land Fabric Domain (LFD) and the Localized Land Domains (LLD), are new concept for structuring of land parcels at comparatively low accuracy but well-defined topologically adjusted feature classes to manipulate as electronic information base to sustain the national land administration, real estate management and spatial data infrastructure development. The system architecture designs and the descriptive feature class overview elaborate the land administration system developers to begin their own LLD systems and interactive collaboration with national domains in order to manage overall system compatibility and consistency. The research focuses on the land information system (LIS) currently maintained and operated by the Survey Department and national issues in sustainable land administration of the country. Research focuses to analyze the prevailing process and outcomes of the LIS and introduces possible successive system architectures for implementation. The introductory LFD will be discussed against the feature topology on the basis of geospatial data science and then detailed feature classification will further be discussed accommodating entity relation diagrams. Proposed LLD with process architecture models will be conceptualized for successive implementation. The localized land domains will be structured and interactively linked through national LADM ISO-19152 guidelines for sustainable land administration of the country

A Technique of Improved Medial Meniscus Visualization by Anterior Cruciate Ligament Graft Placement in Chronic Anterior Cruciate Deficient Knees

It is customary to perform medial meniscus repair before anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) graft placement when undertaken as a combined procedure. However, in chronic ACL-deficient knees, intraoperative anterior tibiofemoral translation can cause the medial meniscus repair to be more technically challenging. Intraoperative anterior tibiofemoral translation can both reduce the visualization of the medial meniscus and make its reduction unstable. An operative sequence alteration of ACL graft placement and tensioning before medial meniscal repair improves medial meniscus visualization in chronically ACL-deficient knees by using the ACL graft’s ability to prevent anterior tibiofemoral translation. The technique sequence is as follows: (a) the medial meniscus is reduced, (b) ACL reconstruction is undertaken using a hamstring graft without final tibia fixation, (c) distal graft tension is manually applied to distal graft sutures by the surgeon to prevent tibiofemoral subluxation, (d) the medial meniscus is repaired while graft tension is applied, and (e) the graft is then fixed to the tibia using an interference screw or another device

Helping Students Build Learning Communities

Building learning communities and providing ways of engagement in a fully online course is important to keep students motivated and help them with their learning. However, finding effective ways to build learning communities in fully online courses can be challenging due to the flexible nature of the courses and the diversity of student cohorts. In 2021, a term-long group project was introduced into a large, fully online, general education course to help provide students with peer-learning opportunities and teach them how to effectively work in a group. Dynamic ongoing projects, such as these, give insights into how students understand concepts and when is the perfect time to add interventions and scaffolding when they are struggling. Moving away from individual assessments to a group project also adds value, as the students are naturally more inclined to become competent at a task as mastery occurs together

Corporate-LIS for Effective Land Administration of Sri Lanka

A drastic improvement on the technical and the administrational sector follows some global trends. E-government with location based applications have been initiated and launched in most developed countries and conducted in different stages of implementation. These projects greatly influence the Land administration sector witnessing the general truth; about eighty percent of all information is spatially referenced. E-application at privilege of client interaction has opened new ways of co-operation between the public and the private sector in the area of electronic Land Administration too. Spatial data are produced on various levels with different contents and different standards. Especially land administration projects will only be successful when all the players in the game follow the same rules. Hence, Land Information System (LIS) in corporation with relevant stakeholders can play a dramatic role in e-land administration of the country. Creation of seamless set of parcel data, based on country’s administrative hierarchy; Divisional Secretary Divisions (DSD) was the greatest achievement for successive LIS, in which all the parcel related information could be easily mapped for user interaction. Land parcel, being the key object in LIS should be graphically created through a suitable survey method. As the responsible organization for land surveying in the country, the Survey Department is conducting the task with well accurate field surveys. Field surveying for parcel based cadastre has been conducted in years back with resulting many progressive areas while a complete survey has been done in Moratuwa and Ratmalana Divisional Secretariats. Hence, in this paper, while discussing the LIS for whole the country, Moratuwa Divisional Secretariat will be taken as the project area. Moratuwa is situated next to the capital city; Colombo, and it is one of the populated and built-up areas in the country. The area is almost flat and 3-10m average Mean Sea Level (MSL) height depicted in the vicinity. The state land administration is governed by the Divisional Secretary and infrastructure development is mainly handled by the Local Authority; Moratuwa Municipality Council (MMC). A design or creation will not be a product, until it is published for customer use. Hence, the proceedings need to be attended are numerous for making the LIS to be an effective and efficient product for its customers. The paper will further discuss on the follow up actions for developing the system architecture, middle ware interface, web Application etc. This article may be very useful for those who wish to develop location based applications related in effective land administration towards the sustainability of the country.Keywords: Land Information System, Land Administration, Cadastre, Land Parce

Understanding the relevance of science in real life through group projects

PROBLEM Finding effective ways to assess the practical component of science courses can be challenging as they have a wide range of learning objectives. PLAN Rather than using written exams to asses practicals, a new structured enquiry-based task was designed to foster a deeper understanding of laboratory learning. ACTION The students were put into groups and assigned a metabolic condition related to biochemical pathways they studied in lectures. They had to design and present an experiment to diagnose a patient with their assigned condition using an experimental technique learned in the laboratory. This assignment targeted essential skills such as teamwork, communication, relevance of biochemistry in real life, experimental design, peer assessment, critical thinking and problem solving. REFLECTION Dynamic ongoing assessments such as these give insights into how students understand concepts and when is the perfect time to add interventions and scaffolding when they are struggling. Moving away from an individual exam to a group project also add value as the students are naturally more inclined to become competent at a task as mastery occurs together and their sense of community grows over time. Current data collected through student surveys and mark comparisons suggest that the group project was effective in teaching the essential skills mentioned above

On the same page: Science students' assessment literacy

Assessment and feedback are key concerns for tertiary students, as evidenced by university and national student experience surveys (QILT, 2020). Understanding student literacy around assessment and feedback is an important consideration in assessment design (Carless, 2015), especially after the pandemic changed assessment practices and expectations. At the University of New South Wales (UNSW), we were approached by the student representative council, concerned about an incongruence between student and instructor’s understanding of assessment terms and performance expectations. Current assessment literacy research supports a cohort-based approach to understanding students' assessment literacy (Deeley & Bovill, 2017; Richards & Pilcher, 2014). Our aim was to investigate students' understanding of common assessment terms and the purpose of assessment by surveying students from the Faculty of Science. The survey will be supplemented with focus groups for a more in-depth discussion around the purpose of assessment and feedback at university. This project aims to develop an assessment lexicon, as well as recommendations for capturing the assessment literacy of a cohort. Our end goal is to work directly with students to develop new assessment tasks for science courses based on the findings from the survey and the focus groups. Here, we can present preliminary findings on student assessment literacy in science at UNSW. REFERENCES Carless, D. (2015). Excellence in university assessment : learning from award-winning practice. Routledge. Deeley, S. J., & Bovill, C. (2017). Staff student partnership in assessment: enhancing assessment literacy through democratic practices. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(3), 463-477. Richards, K., & Pilcher, N. (2014). Contextualising higher education assessment task words with an ‘anti-glossary’ approach. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(5), 604-625. QILT. (2020). Student Experience Survey. Social Research Centre. https://www.qilt.edu.au/surveys/student-experience-survey-(ses)#repor

Predicting Tie Strength between Facebook Friends to Improve Accuracy in Travel Recommendation Systems

People rely on their trusted circle of friends for advice and recommendations on everything from travel destinations to purchase decisions. With the extensive use of social networks these relationships are now taken to an electronic platform, where they manifest as likes, comments, wall posts, etc., on social media networks. This paper explores the novel idea that such user relationships can be extracted to significantly improve the accuracy of commercial recommendation systems by identifying otherwise hidden relationships between users. A multiple linear regression based model capable of extracting such user relationships and their corresponding strength efficiently is introduced under this research and the above hypothesis is tested by integrating the predictive model to an existing social media based travel recommendation system. Finally, experimental results of the proposed model are produced, proving the capability of the model in achieving a significant increase in accuracy in travel recommendations, affirming the considered hypothesis