Promoting reflective dialogue through group analysis of student feedback

This paper describes an activity intended to promote scholarship of teaching through small-group discussion of feedback from students. There is a paucity of literature on group reflection of student feedback which this paper aims to address. Reflection on teaching is often a lone activity but this Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) supported project afforded the opportunity for group reflection by teachers from five institutions during our first project workshop. To provide the data for group analysis, students from the participating institutions completed a survey designed by the project team. A workshop activity was devised in which groups analysed the qualitative survey responses and derived principles for learning and teaching based on their reflection. Evaluation of the activity included workshop participant evaluation forms, feedback from the ALTC project team and evaluator; and the principles developed during the activity. A notable measure of the activity’s impact is that most participants stated that as a result of the workshop, of which this activity was a significant part, they intended to change something about their own teaching

An Action Learning Approach to Changing Teaching Practice Using Group Reflection on Student and Graduate Feedback

We present a model for a collaborative activity intended to promote scholarship of teaching through small-group discussion of feedback from students. Reflection on teaching is often a lone activity and this is reflected in the paucity of literature on group reflection, however literature suggests that lone reflection on teaching can fail to conform entrenched attitudes. This paper describes the process by which we collected data on students, and former students learning experiences; prepared the qualitative data for discussion by cross-institutional groups; structured the discussion activities to maintain focus on cultural change; and evaluated the activities’ impact. The activity was carried out as part of our ALTC-supported project’s first academic forum and repeated during the second forum, with refinements to the procedure based on evaluation of the first activity. Data collected for evaluation of the first and second iterations of the activity suggests that it is an effective strategy for the promotion of scholarship of teaching and the associated development and implementation of changes to teaching practice

c-Abl phosphorylates Dok1 to promote filopodia during cell spreading

Filopodia are dynamic F-actin structures that cells use to explore their environment. c-Abl tyrosine kinase promotes filopodia during cell spreading through an unknown mechanism that does not require Cdc42 activity. Using an unbiased approach, we identified Dok1 as a specific c-Abl substrate in spreading fibroblasts. When activated by cell adhesion, c-Abl phosphorylates Y361 of Dok1, promoting its association with the Src homology 2 domain (SH2)/SH3 adaptor protein Nck. Each signaling component was critical for filopodia formation during cell spreading, as evidenced by the finding that mouse fibroblasts lacking c-Abl, Dok1, or Nck had fewer filopodia than cells reexpressing the product of the disrupted gene. Dok1 and c-Abl stimulated filopodia in a mutually interdependent manner, indicating that they function in the same signaling pathway. Dok1 and c-Abl were both detected in filopodia of spreading cells, and therefore may act locally to modulate actin. Our data suggest a novel pathway by which c-Abl transduces signals to the actin cytoskeleton through phosphorylating Dok1 Y361 and recruiting Nck

Field testing of portable led flasher for nominal power measurements of pv-modules on-site

Nominal power measurements of individual PV modules are needed to quantify the critical modules of PV plants offering lower energy production than expected. Today’s state of the art procedure of shipping a small number of modules to a laboratory is time- and cost intensive and it bears the chance of accidental damage. The Portable LED Flasher (PLF) was developed to require no dismounting of the modules. The quality of the PLF was tested on three PV plants in Switzerland. Additionally, ten PV modules of each plant were measured in the certified indoor laboratory of SUPSI, resulting in a maximum deviation of 3% of the STC values. Furthermore, a round robin test on a single crystalline silicon reference module at 25°C was performed at the JRC’s ESTI laboratory, the Swiss Mobile Flasher Bus and SUPSI resulting in a maximum deviation of the mean values below 1% compared to the PLF. A throughput of up to 150 modules or 500 modules respectively per day is expected and the total measurement costs are estimated to be about a tenth of the costs compared to an indoor laboratory. Module temperature measurement is crucial for a low total uncertainty. Thus, methods such as pre-shadowing of the module and approximation of cell temperature are the current focus of further improvement of the PLF measurement method

Guidelines for online learning in soil science: A synthesis of ideas from academics, students and employers

As part of an ALTC-supported curriculum development project, we engaged teaching staff, employers, current students and recent graduates in the discipline of soil science to develop a set of guidelines for online learning in our discipline. During a one-day Forum, three experienced practitioners in online learning design in engineering, science and health presented and discussed their approaches with the forum participants. The forum attendees then developed guidelines for online learning in soil science based on their personal experiences together with the presentations. The resulting guidelines were compared with the literature and a very good match found in assessment, content, communication and feedback, motivation and groupwork. Two additional aspects that apply particularly to teaching soil science in Australia were identified, namely the importance of defining agreed outcomes that take into account regional differences across academic institutions and accommodating the broad range of prior knowledge that students of soil science bring to online courses

State-of-the-art for assessment of solar energy technologies 2019

To realize the EU target of energy transition to a carbon neutral energy system, wide scale deployment of photovoltaic solar energy is required. This report describes the contribution of the European Solar Test Installation to enable this transition.JRC.C.2-Energy Efficiency and Renewable

The SXS Collaboration catalog of binary black hole simulations

Accurate models of gravitational waves from merging black holes are necessary for detectors to observe as many events as possible while extracting the maximum science. Near the time of merger, the gravitational waves from merging black holes can be computed only using numerical relativity. In this paper, we present a major update of the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration catalog of numerical simulations for merging black holes. The catalog contains 2018 distinct configurations (a factor of 11 increase compared to the 2013 SXS catalog), including 1426 spin-precessing configurations, with mass ratios between 1 and 10, and spin magnitudes up to 0.998. The median length of a waveform in the catalog is 39 cycles of the dominant $\ell=m=2$ gravitational-wave mode, with the shortest waveform containing 7.0 cycles and the longest 351.3 cycles. We discuss improvements such as correcting for moving centers of mass and extended coverage of the parameter space. We also present a thorough analysis of numerical errors, finding typical truncation errors corresponding to a waveform mismatch of $\sim 10^{-4}$. The simulations provide remnant masses and spins with uncertainties of 0.03% and 0.1% ($90^{\text{th}}$ percentile), about an order of magnitude better than analytical models for remnant properties. The full catalog is publicly available at https://www.black-holes.org/waveforms .Comment: 33+18 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables, 2,018 binaries. Catalog metadata in ancillary JSON file. v2: Matches version accepted by CQG. Catalog available at https://www.black-holes.org/waveform