Campus Institutional Research Articles

A Survey on E-Learning System with Data Mining

E-learning process has been widely used in university campus and educational institutions are playing vital role to enhance the skill set of students. Modern E-learning done by many electronic devices, such as smartphones, Tabs, and so on, on existing E-learning tools is insufficient to achieve the purpose of online training of education. This paper presents a survey of online e-Learning authoring tools for creating and integrating reusable e-learning tool for generation and enhancing existing learning resources with them. The work concentrates on evaluation of the existing e-learning tools a, and authoring tools that have shown good performance in the past for online learners. This survey work takes more than 20 online tools that deal with the educational sector mechanism, for the purpose of observations, and the outcome were analyzed. The findings of this paper are the main reason for developing a new tool, and it shows that educators can enhance existing learning resources by adding

MODEL LANSKAP PERMAKULTURA KEBUN PERCOBAAN CIKABAYAN UNTUK MEMENUHI KEBUTUHAN PANGAN BERGIZI MAHASISWA ASRAMA IPB

The food quality is determined by the food system, from the food production process, food distribution to food consumption. The production process is related to the agricultural landscape planning. That is the most important step to contribute the production results. Yet, basic knowledge about its benefits values for increasing the potential production are unknown, hence people usually ignore this step planning. Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) as the center of excellence of agricultural science and technology can be a potential sample for application of agricultural planning for production. Thus, the concept of permaculture, which is linked by agricultural productivity based on socio-economic, and ecological has a big chance to be applied. The general objectives of this research were to compose permaculture landscape model and for supply nutritious food needs IPB’s dormitory students. The research surveyed bio-physics potency in Cikabayan campus experimental sites. These estimations are really useful for site analysis of model of permaculture. Result showed the nutritious food needs ingredients for IPB’s dormitory students is 2 299.14 tons from source of plant foods and 406.35 tons from source of animal food which is divided into 18 commodities. The results of agricultural planning with the permaculture landscape model at Cikabayan experimental sites. Results showed that there is a potential production corn 28.43 tons, spinach 10.89 tons, tomato 22.348 tons, kale 6.54 tons, bean 16.44 tons, celery 3.92 tons,and spring onion 5.6 tons. Totally production to supply food needs plant about 94.168 tons. These productions results from Cikabayan experimental sites can supply about food needs plant resources 4.09% for IPB’s dormitory students. This approach could be used by local campus institution to created food self-sufficiency from the assets of land.

Problems Facing Undergraduate Students At Al Ghad International College For Health Sciences: Basis To Improve Academic Performance

This action research has sought answers to the following research questions: What are the problems encountered by the low performing students of different departments in terms of psychosocial, psychological and educational? What are the proposed specific measures geared towards the enhancement of learners’ academic performance? Researchers have utilized a mixed method research design, both quantitative and qualitative methods which gave them greater confidence in establishing conclusion of the study. They have figured out specific measures to address problems in terms of psychosocial, psychological and education domains confronting the subjects of the study. These proposed measures are adaptation of academic performance flow chart and the revised attendance grading scheme. The authors also suggest the preparatory department to create an English proficiency committee which will design English proficiency programs for this low performing group zeroing in listening, reading, writing and speaking proficiencies. They also propose for the College to use better software management system and to conduct an annual departmental curriculum review and enhancement. They have included all of the students with GPA 2.75 and less from different departments of Al-Ghad International College Dammam Male Campus, a large and young private academic institution which offers various health care programs as participants of the study. A self-made questionnaire has been constructed and has become the main tool to gather the necessary data and interview has done to dissect the variables under scrutiny. Researchers have also used a standardized test (Kessler Psychological Distress Scale) which determined the psychological distress status of the subject learners. The gathered numeric data have been tabulated, evaluated, analyzed and interpreted using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 22.

Parallel-group randomized study on the impact of a modified TeamSTEPPS training on resident and nurse attitudes toward teamwork and their adherence to patient safety protocols

Introduction: Gaps remain in what constitutes optimal healthcare team training in terms of design and impact. This study utilizes a parallel group randomized design to study the impact of a modified TeamSTEPPS training on resident and nurse attitudes toward teamwork and their adherence to patient safety (PS) protocols. Methods: The intervention randomized 76 participants (38 nurses and 38 1st year residents) equally into one of four parallel training groups to receive central venous catheter (CVC) lines simulation training with and without a modified 1-h TeamSTEPPS training. Both groups participated in video-based CVC instruction and a simulation CVC case scenario using high-fidelity mannequins. Participants were randomized twice: Initially into TeamSTEPPS and non-TeamSTEPPS training groups using a computer-generated randomization list, and then into resident-nurse pairs prior to the simulation CVC case scenario by selecting room assignments out of a hat. At the conclusion of a training session, participants completed the TeamSTEPPS questionnaire to measure perceptions for teamwork. Resident/nurse pairs' adherence to PS protocols during the simulation CVC case were recorded by the laboratory's audio/video system to measure team performance. Three trained and blinded postdoctoral research associates scored all recordings independently. Residents were eligible for the study if they were a 1st year postgraduate trainees with no prior TeamSTEPPS training. Nurses were eligible if they had Results: Repeated-measures analyses of variance showed significant differences in attitudes of teamwork between groups. However, there was no significant difference in adherence to safety markers between groups. There was high, >70% exact agreement among the three raters. Exploratory analyses revealed that team behaviors predicted adherence to PS protocols. No adverse events or side effects were observed or reported. Conclusions: This study found that a modified TeamSTEPPS training improved resident and nurse attitudes of teamwork. However, this improvement did not translate into differences between groups with and without the TeamSTEPPS training in their adherence to PS protocols. Additional research is needed to determine the optimal team-training designs that improve PS. This research was funded by a research grant from the Albert Einstein Society, Philadelphia, PA, and was approved for exemption by Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia campus's Institutional Review Board. The authors report no declarations of interest. The following core competencies are addressed in this article: Medical knowledge, interpersonal and communication skills, patient care, practice-based learning and improvement, professionalism, and systems-based practice.

Campus sustainability initiatives and performance: do they correlate?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that there are correlations between campus sustainability initiatives and environmental performance, as measured by resource consumption and waste generation performance metrics. Institutions of higher education would like to imply that their campus sustainability initiatives are good proxies for their environmental performance. Design/methodology/approach – Using data reported through the Association for the Advancement in Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking and Rating System (AASHE STARS) framework, a series of univariate multiple linear regression models were constructed to test for correlations between energy, greenhouse gas (GHG), water and waste performance metrics, and credit points awarded to institutions for various campus sustainability initiatives. Findings – There are very limited correlations between institutional environmental performance and adoption of campus sustainability initiatives, be they targeted operational or coordination and planning best practices, or curricular, co-curricular or research activities. Conversely, there are strong correlations between environmental performance and campus characteristics, namely, institution type and climate zone. Practical implications – Institutional decision makers should not assume that implementing best practices given credit by AASHE STARS will lead to improved environmental performance. Those assessing institutional sustainability should be wary of institutions who cite initiatives to imply a certain level of environmental performance or performance improvement. Originality/value – This is the first paper to use data reported through the AASHE STARS framework to assess correlations between campus initiatives and environmental performance. It extends beyond previous research by considering energy, water and waste performance metrics in addition to GHG emissions, and it considers campus sustainability initiatives in addition to campus characteristics.

Lessons of Experience: Reform Initiatives in African Universities

white paper is indeed aiming at a moving target in trying to keep the upper end of U.K. higher education institutions competitive in income terms with even the best of the U.S. publics, let alone the top private institutions, where annual fees are already nearing $30K. And, indeed, there is also a trend toward the semiprivatization of state flagship campus institutions (now being called “the public Ivies”), which may push fees yet higher than the ca.$7K per annum referred to above. If U.K. and U.S. higher education systems continue to diverge on funding, they will then share certain features. The politics of affordability of higher education for “Middle America” during the 1990s trumped the politics of access to higher education for “Poor America,” which is not surprising given the relative voting power of the two constituencies. This scenario potentially will be echoed in the United Kingdom, where in response to New Labour’s white paper and its proposed £3K per annum tuition fee for “Middle England” the Conservative Party has focused on affordability, asserting that it would avoid the need to increase fees (or even levying them at all) by reducing the size of the higher education system and hence its accessibility to “Poor England” as a means of saving money.

Risk Mitigation of Shared Electronic Records System in Campus Institutions: Medical Social Work Practice in Singapore

In 2013, the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) Campus initiated a shared electronic system where patient records and documentations were standardized and shared across institutions within the Campus. The project was initiated to enhance quality of health care, improve accessibility, and ensure integrated (as opposed to fragmented) care for best outcomes in our patients. In mitigating the risks of ICT, it was found that familiarity with guiding ethical principles, and ensuring adherence to regulatory and technical competencies in medical social work were important. The need to negotiate and maneuver in a large environment within the Campus to ensure proactive integrative process helped.

Why Laughing Boy should make us weep

W interbourne View is etched on the consciousness of the public. The horrific abuse and the neglect of people living in NHS campus institutions were events that many of us thought were relegated to the past (Department of Health (DH), 2012). These campus institutions should have been closed down long ago. Yet this is not the case. There are now 2615 people living in large, long-stay institutions in the UK. The national plan was for such services to close, or transform, to enable a better quality of life for people with learning disabilities. The latest figures show, that of the 2615 people living in these institutions, only 256 have an agreed transfer date (NHS England, 2014). A recent report (Hussain and HydeBales, 2014) has given an account of the avoidable death of an 18-year-old man in just such an institution

CYP2C9*8 frequency distribution in Puerto Ricans: implications for warfarin dosing (1141.10)

Warfarin is an oral anticoagulant that requires individual monitoring since serious adverse events are common. CYP2C9 encodes for the enzyme mainly responsible of S‐warfarin’s metabolism. Polymorphisms in CYP2C9 have been previously found to be strongly associated with observed warfarin dose variability in different populations, but not in Caribbean Hispanics. Caribbean Hispanics originated as a result of a complex admixture among Caucasians, Africans and Amerindians ancestors‐a characteristic that should be considered for warfarin management. The rare loss‐of‐function CYP2C9*8 allelic variant is reportedly more prevalent among individuals with African heritage. Since Puerto Ricans has a significant contribution of African ancestry in their genetic backgrounds, this cross‐sectional study was aimed to determine the frequency of CYP2C9*8 in a cohort of 150 Puerto Rican patients undergoing warfarin therapy. DNA specimens were extracted and genotyped for the CYP2C9*8 using a PCR‐based Taqman genotyping assay. We found 3 heterozygous for the CYP2C9*8 variant in our study cohort, corresponding to a minor allele frequency of 1% (95%CI: 0.0026‐0.031). The observed frequency met Hardy‐Weinberg equilibrium. Allele frequency in our cohort was found to be significantly lower than that from a previous report in African‐Americans (0.01 versus 0.047, respectively, p=0.045 by two‐tailed z‐test), with a carrier frequency of 1 in 50 (Puerto Ricans) versus 1 in 11 (African‐Americans). Due to the CYP2C9*8 prevalence found among Puerto Ricans, we concluded that this variant should be included in any pharmacogenetic‐guided algorithm for warfarin dose predictions in this population. Approved by University of Puerto Rico, Medical Sciences Campus Institutional Review Board protocol A4070109.Grant Funding Source: Supported by NIH grants# 5SC2HL110393 (NHLBI) and grant# G12RR‐03051 (RCMI‐ NCRR).

An Exploration of Sense of Community and Student Success Using the National Survey of Student Engagement

Abstract This study created a sense-of-community survey from the National Survey of Student Engagement to study the relationship between sense of community and student success. Factor analysis suggested four factors: Campus Social Milieu, Divergent Thinking, Institutional Involvement, and Relationships. Reliable relationships were apparent between sense of community and student success.

An Exploration of Sense of Community and Student Success Using the National Survey of Student Engagement

Abstract This study created a sense-of-community survey from the National Survey of Student Engagement to study the relationship between sense of community and student success. Factor analysis suggested four factors: Campus Social Milieu, Divergent Thinking, Institutional Involvement, and Relationships. Reliable relationships were apparent between sense of community and student success.

Temporal Encoding of Spatial Information during Active Visual Fixation

Humans and other species continually perform microscopic eye movements, even when attending to a single point. These movements, which include drifts and microsaccades, are under oculomotor control, elicit strong neural responses, and have been thought to serve important functions. The influence of these fixational eye movements on the acquisition and neural processing of visual information remains unclear. Here, we show that during viewing of natural scenes, microscopic eye movements carry out a crucial information-processing step: they remove predictable correlations in natural scenes by equalizing the spatial power of the retinal image within the frequency range of ganglion cells' peak sensitivity. This transformation, which had been attributed to center-surround receptive field organization, occurs prior to any neural processing and reveals a form of matching between the statistics of natural images and those of normal eye movements. We further show that the combined effect of microscopic eye movements and retinal receptive field organization is to convert spatial luminance discontinuities into synchronous firing events, beginning the process of edge detection. Thus, microscopic eye movements are fundamental to two goals of early visual processing: redundancy reduction and feature extraction.

An Exploration of Sense of Community and Student Success Using the National Survey of Student Engagement

This study created a sense-of-community survey from the National Survey of Student Engagement to study the relationship between sense of community and student success. Factor analysis suggested four factors: Campus Social Milieu, Divergent Thinking, Institutional Involvement, and Relationships. Reliable relationships were apparent between sense of community and student success.

Effects of Lipid-Analog Detergent Solubilization on the Functionality and Lipidic Cubic Phase Mobility of the Torpedo Californica Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants 2RO1GM56371-12, 5T34GM07821-31, Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) and 2R25GM061151; Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE); University of Puerto Rico Rio, Piedras Campus Institutional Funds for Research; and the Specialized Neurosciences Research Program (SNRP) U54NS0433011. We acknowledge the contribution to this study by grants 1S10RR 13705-01 and DBI-0923132 to establish and upgrade the Confocal Microscopy Facility at the University of Puerto Rico (CIF-UPR) and the University of Puerto Rico Institutional Funds.

Dysregulation of miRNAs in AL amyloidosis

Bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs) were purified using anti-CD138 immunomagnetic beads, from aspirates obtained with permission of the Boston University Medical Campus Institutional Review Board, from patients with immunoglobulin light chain (AL) amyloidosis and from controls. Expression levels of MicroRNAs (miRNAs) were compared by microarray; 10 were found to be increased more than 1.5-fold. These results were confirmed using stem-loop RT-qPCR for the most highly upregulated miRNAs, miR-148a, miR-26a, and miR-16. miR-16, a micro-RNA linked to other hematopoietic diseases, was significantly increased in the AL group at diagnosis, and also in treated patients with persistent monoclonal plasma cells in the bone marrow, but not in patients who achieved a hematologic remission after therapy. miR-16 can be derived from the miR-16-1/mirR-15, a cluster on chromosome 13 or the miR-16-2/miR-15b cluster on chromosome 3. The expression of miR-15b was much higher than miR-15a in both AL and control BMPC, suggesting that miR-16 in plasma cells is mainly derived from miR-16-2/miR-15b. The anti-apoptosis gene BCL-2, a putative target mRNA that can be downregulated by miR-16, was expressed in BMPCs from AL patients, despite elevated levels of miR-16. Our data suggests that miRNAs are dysregulated in clonal plasma cells in AL amyloidosis and may be potentially useful as biomarkers of disease.

The Adipophilin C Terminus Is a Self-folding Membrane-binding Domain That Is Important for Milk Lipid Secretion

Cytoplasmic lipid droplets (CLD) in mammary epithelial cells undergo secretion by a unique membrane envelopment process to produce milk lipids. Adipophilin (ADPH/Plin2), a member of the perilipin/PAT family of lipid droplet-associated proteins, is hypothesized to mediate CLD secretion through interactions with apical plasma membrane elements. We found that the secretion of CLD coated by truncated ADPH lacking the C-terminal region encoding a putative four-helix bundle structure was impaired relative to that of CLD coated by full-length ADPH. We used homology modeling and analyses of the solution and membrane binding properties of purified recombinant ADPH C terminus to understand how this region possibly mediates CLD secretion. Homology modeling supports the concept that the ADPH C terminus forms a four-helix bundle motif and suggests that this structure can form stable membrane bilayer interactions. Circular dichroism and protease mapping studies confirmed that the ADPH C terminus is an independently folding α-helical structure that is relatively resistant to urea denaturation. Liposome binding studies showed that the purified C terminus binds to phospholipid membranes through electrostatic dependent interactions, and cell culture studies documented that it localizes to the plasma membrane. Collectively, these data provide direct evidence that the ADPH C terminus forms a stable membrane binding helical structure that is important for CLD secretion. We speculate that interactions between the four-helix bundle of ADPH and membrane phospholipids may be an initial step in milk lipid secretion.

First-Year Composition Placement at Open-Admission, Two-Year Campuses: Changing Campus Culture, Institutional Practice, and Student Success

First-Year Composition Placement at Open-Admission, Two-Year Campuses: Changing Campus Culture, Institutional Practice, and Student Success

Development of WAP Based Students Information System in Campus Environment

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to sharing information between students and lecturers in order to enhance quality of information in campus environment via WAP technology. We describe a network for distributing campus information among lecturers and students. The concept of developing campus information via WAP technology is to ensure that student can access information at any time, at any locations. WAP Based Students Information System helps the students and lecturers on campus to find and access information based on ad-hoc basic, which is of interest and relevant to students or lecturers; they only need a PDA or a mobile phone. This paper describes the campus environment has been adapted for use on the new generation of WAP-enabled Internet devices such as PDA and mobile phones to access ad-hoc information. The results and analysis show that based on framework the WAP-based customized information services have successfully performed in campus environment. Therefore, campus institutions can provide and offer information for mobile users (students) as value added services.

Development of WAP Based Students Information System in Campus Environment

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to sharing information between students and lecturers in order to enhance quality of information in campus environment via WAP technology. We describe a network for distributing campus information among lecturers and students. The concept of developing campus information via WAP technology is to ensure that student can access information at any time, at any locations. WAP Based Students Information System helps the students and lecturers on campus to find and access information based on ad-hoc basic, which is of interest and relevant to students or lecturers; they only need a PDA or a mobile phone. This paper describes the campus environment has been adapted for use on the new generation of WAP-enabled Internet devices such as PDA and mobile phones to access ad-hoc information. The results and analysis show that based on framework the WAP-based customized information services have successfully performed in campus environment. Therefore, campus institutions can provide and offer information for mobile users (students) as value added services.

Overseeing Study Abroad Research: Challenges, Responsibilities and the Institutional Review Board

This introduction to the third special issue on undergraduate research raises the question of oversight of undergraduate research during study abroad, the responsibilities of sending and receiving institutions for training and preparing students, and what role campus or program Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) should play in that process.