Advances in fluorescence microscopy enable monitoring larger brain areas in-vivo with finer time resolution. The resulting data rates require reproducible analysis pipelines that are reliable, fully ...automated, and scalable to datasets generated over the course of months. We present CaImAn, an open-source library for calcium imaging data analysis. CaImAn provides automatic and scalable methods to address problems common to pre-processing, including motion correction, neural activity identification, and registration across different sessions of data collection. It does this while requiring minimal user intervention, with good scalability on computers ranging from laptops to high-performance computing clusters. CaImAn is suitable for two-photon and one-photon imaging, and also enables real-time analysis on streaming data. To benchmark the performance of CaImAn we collected and combined a corpus of manual annotations from multiple labelers on nine mouse two-photon datasets. We demonstrate that CaImAn achieves near-human performance in detecting locations of active neurons.
English-medium instruction (EMI) is widely believed in higher education contexts to support the internationalisation of universities, to make study programmes more accessible to international ...students and to enhance the international prestige of academic staff. However, the pressure on European institutions to offer subjects through English raises the issue of whether a sufficient number of teachers are capable of teaching their subject content through the language. Although some recent research has found that EMI programme directors are largely satisfied with the English proficiency of their teaching staff (Wächter and Maiworm, 2014. English-Taught Programmes in European Higher Education. The State of Play in 2014. Bonn: Lemmens. Accessed November 17, 2017.
http://www.aca-secretariat.be/fileadmin/aca_docs/images/members/ACA-2015_English_Taught_01.pdf
), other reviews of current practice have highlighted a need for a more structured and rigorous approach to the language and methodology training of teachers (Dearden 2015. "English as a Medium of Instruction - A Growing Global Phenomenon." Accessed 17 November 2017.
http://www.britishcouncil.org/education/ihe/knowledge-centre/english-language-higher-education/report-english-medium-instruction
; Halbach and Lázaro 2015. "La acreditación del nivel de lengua inglesa en las universidades españolas: Actualización 2015." Accessed November 17, 2017.
http://www.britishcouncil.es/sites/britishcouncil.es/files/british-co
uncil-la-acreditacion-del-nivel-de-lengua-inglesa.pdf
). This article reports on the findings of a survey of 70 European universities carried out in 2014-2015 which provides an overview of current practices in the training and accreditation of university teachers in EMI. The findings reveal a very eclectic range of approaches to training and accrediting teachers working in this area.
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It has been widely noted that society has moved away from seeing truth as an objective and, in some ways, important part of what it means to be educated. Varied conceptions of truth have existed and ...have been debated in the halls of academia for years but recently a shift has occurred in which truth has lost its status broadly as a virtue. In fact, in 2016, Oxford Dictionary declared "post-truth" as its international word of the year, defined as: 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief'. Living in a world that is post-truth has direct implications on the education of a society's youth. This book will examine several broad conceptions of truth and present them as truth profiles considering their implications for education. This survey will consider the role of truth as it relates to teaching and the act of being a teacher, engage with challenging questions about what curriculum will be learned and its implications for our understanding of truth and specific consideration is attended to the impacts that one's conception of truth has for what they prioritize in the classroom, their instructional practice, and on learning itself. This book will take a focused look at the concept of truth and how varied conceptions of truth impact teaching and learning through theoretical, analytic, and practical examples.
With the increase of solar photovoltaic (PV) penetration in power system, the impact of random fluctuation of PV power on the secure operation of power grid becomes more and more serious. ...High-precision PV power forecasting can effectively promote the grid's accommodation of PV power generation. Cloud is the most important factor affecting the surface irradiance and PV power. For the ultra-short-term solar PV power forecast considering the influence of cloud movement, it is necessary to be able to obtain the surface irradiance according to the sky cloud observation data. Therefore, in order to accurately achieve the real-time mapping relationship between sky image and surface irradiance, a hybrid mapping model based on deep learning applied for solar PV power forecasting is proposed in this article. First, the sky image data are clustered based on the feature extraction of convolutional autoencoder and K -means clustering algorithm after preprocess stage. Second, a hybrid mapping model based on deep learning methods are established for surface irradiance. Finally, the simulation results are compared and evaluated with different deep learning methods (CNN, LSTM, and ANN). The results show that the proposed model in this article has higher accuracy and can maintain robustness under different weather conditions.
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic forced many institutions to unexpectedly adopt online learning methods to teach their students. As students’ perspectives are vital to be understood to determine ...whether any teaching learning method is optimum for implementation, we conducted a questionnaire-based study of students of a medical college.
Aims and Objectives: The objective of this research study was to gain a better understanding of problems concerned with online learning methods.
Materials and Methods: Undergraduate 1st year medical students of four different medical colleges of India were the participants. After ethical committee permission, responses were invited for a Google form’s questionnaire. Students were asked in detail about their choices.
Results: Most students preferred the offline mode of study over the online mode. Majority of students preferred to keep their own camera off during online lectures. Biochemistry subject was considered comparatively easier and Anatomy was considered difficult to learn in online mode compared to offline mode. Few students felt comfortable with online learning of more than 5 h daily. Concentration in classes was difficult, deemed more difficult for online classes and majority of students felt a lack of motivation in online learning.
Conclusions: Institutes using the online mode of learning need to address student’s problems before they mandate certain rules like keeping students’ videos on. Lack of motivation and screen fatigue are common problems among students which needs to be addressed by counseling or mentoring if necessary. Subject specific preferences of students need to be taken care of.
Universities around the world are incorporating online learning, often relying on videos (asynchronous multimedia). We systematically reviewed the effects of video on learning in higher education. We ...searched five databases using 27 keywords to find randomized trials that measured the learning effects of video among college students. We conducted full-text screening, data extraction, and risk of bias in duplicate. We calculated pooled effect sizes using multilevel random-effects meta-analysis. Searches retrieved 9,677 unique records. After screening 329 full texts, 105 met inclusion criteria, with a pooled sample of 7,776 students. Swapping video for existing teaching methods led to small improvements in student learning (g = 0.28). Adding video to existing teaching led to strong learning benefits (g = 0.80). Although results may be subject to some experimental and publication biases, they suggest that videos are unlikely to be detrimental and usually improve student learning.
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Anxiety is highly prevalent among nursing students even in normal circumstances. In Israel during the covid-19 pandemic and mandatory lockdown, nursing students encountered a new reality of economic ...uncertainty, fear of infection, challenges of distance education, lack of personal protection equipment (PPE) at work etc. The objective of this study was to assess levels of anxiety and ways of coping among nursing students in the Ashkelon Academic College, Southern District, Israel.
A cross-sectional study was conducted among all 244 students in the nursing department during the third week of a national lockdown. Anxiety level was assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-Item Scale with a cut-off point of 10 for moderate and of 15 for severe anxiety. Factor analysis was used to identify coping components. The prevalence of moderate and severe anxiety was 42.8% and 13.1% respectively. Gender, lack of PPE, and fear of infection were significantly associated with a higher anxiety score. Stronger resilience and usage of humor were associated with significantly lower anxiety levels, while mental disengagement with higher anxiety levels.
The nursing department's staff may contribute in lowering student anxiety by maintaining a stable educational framework, providing high quality distant teaching and encouraging and supporting students through this challenging period.
•Anxiety is highly prevalent among nursing students even in normal circumstances.•The prevalence of moderate and severe anxiety during the covid-19 pandemic was 43% and 13% respectively.•Female gender and lack of PPE at work were significantly associated with higher anxiety scores.•Stronger resilience and usage of humor were associated with significantly lower anxiety levels.•Mental disengagement (alcohol, sedative drugs usage and excessive eating) was associated with higher anxiety levels.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The growing interest in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has resulted in enthusiasm in and active pursuit of improved methods of foreign/second-language (L2) teaching in Europe. ...However, the definition and scope of the term CLIL both internally, as used by CLIL advocates in Europe, and externally, as compared with immersion education in and outside Europe, indicate that the core characteristics of CLIL are understood in different ways with respect to: the balance between language and content instruction, the nature of the target languages involved, instructional goals, defining characteristics of student participants, and pedagogical approaches to integrating language and content instruction. We argue further that attempts to define CLIL by distinguishing it from immersion approaches to L2 education are often misguided. The aim of this article is to examine these ambiguities and to call for clarification of the definition of CLIL. Clarification is critical if CLIL is to evolve and improve systematically and if CLIL educators are to benefit from the experiences and knowledge acquired in other educational settings.
O presente trabalho apresenta uma proposta de produção do gênero abstract utilizando-se uma metodologia de correção dialógica, orientada por uma perspectiva bakhtiniana, e focada na discursividade do ...texto. A abordagem teórica sustentar-se-á numa perspectiva dialógica para o ensino dos gêneros textuais, partindo de uma visão discursiva sobre o ensino de produção escrita. Adotamos como critério de análise quatro qualidades discursivas propostas por Guedes (1994), necessárias para a construção de um texto: unidade temática, questionamento, objetividade e concretude. Estas qualidades serão utilizadas como ferramenta de correção textual apresentando os movimentos de reescrita que evidenciam o trabalho com as qualidades discursivas mencionadas.
Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-supported language teaching (TSLT) are often seen as incompatible as they draw on different theories of language learning and language teaching. The ...position adopted in this article, however, is that both approaches are needed especially in instructional contexts where ‘pure’ task-based teaching may be problematic for various reasons. The article makes a case for a modular curriculum consisting of separate (i.e. non-integrated) task-based and structure-based components. Different curriculum models are considered in the light of what is known about how a second language is learned. The model that is proposed assumes the importance of developing fluency first. It consists of a primary task-based module implemented with focus-on-form (Long, 1991) and, once a basic fluency has been achieved, supported by a secondary structural module to provide for explicit accuracy-oriented work to counteract learned selective attention (N. Ellis, 2006): one of the main sources of persistent error. The article also addresses the content and grading of the task-based and structural modules. It considers the factors that need to be considered in the vertical and horizontal grading of tasks but also points out that, for the time being, syllabus designers will have to draw on their experience and intuition as much as on research to make decisions about how to sequence tasks. An argument is presented for treating the structural component as a checklist rather than as a syllabus so as to allow teachers to address selectively those features that are found to be problematic for their students when they perform tasks.
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