Applying Students' Perspectives on Different Teaching Strategies: A Holistic View of Service-Learning Community Engagement

From a university perspective, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) has been identified as a high-impact practice that offers advantages over traditional lecture and assignments, yet students do not always embrace SLCE courses. While most studies of undergraduate students’ perceptions of SLCE focus on particular experiences or on SLCE in general, contextualizing these findings within students’ perceptions of various teaching strategies and knowledge can better assist faculty in engaging students. Drawing on cognitive anthropology, this article is one of the first to conduct a cultural domain analysis to provide insights into how undergraduates conceptualize SLCE in relation to other teaching strategies. This broader analysis of the associations undergraduates make with SLCE reveals how these can carry ramifications for quality engagement with the project and community partners. The results include how faculty can design and scaffold SLCE into their courses in the absence of a centralized agency or formal campus-wide process for regulating SLCE experiences

Pivoting to Virtual Reality, Fostering Holistic Perspectives: How to Create Anthropological 360° Video Exercises and Lectures

This paper addresses two challenges in higher education that increased with the shift to online learning due to COVID-19: translating experiential learning online and supporting student engagement.While virtual reality can be mobilized to address both of these challenges,finding or creating virtual reality that fits a course’s learning objective is a common barrier. This paper illustrates how instructors can integrate anthropological readings with freely available 360°videos or Google Earth to create their own virtual reality-like experiences and class activities. Such immersive experiences can support students in applying anthropology to real-world issues from any location with a smart device and internet connection and lead to a more holistic understanding of social issues. They also present an alternative to narrated PowerPoints or videos in online and in-person learning that can foster student engagement with the content

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

Pivoting to Virtual Reality, Fostering Holistic Perspectives: How to Create Anthropological 360° Video Exercises and Lectures

This paper addresses two challenges in higher education that increased with the shift to online learning due to COVID-19: translating experiential learning online and supporting student engagement. While virtual reality can be mobilized to address both of these challenges, finding or creating virtual reality that fits a course’s learning objective is a common barrier. This paper illustrates how instructors can integrate anthropological readings with freely available 360° videos or Google Earth to create their own virtual reality-like experiences and class activities. Such immersive experiences can support students in applying anthropology to real-world issues from any location with a smart device and internet connection and lead to a more holistic understanding of social issues. They also present an alternative to narrated PowerPoints or videos in online and in-person learning that can foster student engagement with the content. &nbsp