Thompson Rivers University
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Transformative Curriculum Design through OER Creation: Reports on a Pilot Project
No full textIn May of 2019, Thompson Rivers University (TRU) offered its first version of a week-long course (re)design workshop. Recognizing we had been primarily using resources from other institutions, we opted to create resources specific to TRU through a one-day facilitated writing sprint (a writing sprint involves a team of people with distinct skill-sets coming together to progress an intensive, time-bound project). We believed that a one-day resource-creation sprint would be sufficient to create a few course design resources that TRU faculty could use, both for face-to-face and online course creation and revision. But we were wrong. The project grew from being conceptualized as a few stand-alone documents to being imagined as a large online open educational resource. Since the summer of 2019 a group comprised of faculty, staff, and administrators from TRU’s Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) and the Open Learning Division have been meeting collectively and in smaller groups to prepare a suite of OER which might be used to make OER more accessible for TRU educators and the wider community— with a broad range of additional applications in the areas of curriculum, learning design, and teaching and learning practices across higher education generally. In this panel discussion session, we will outline our goals for and process of creating the OER. As well, we will demonstrate the OER, and session participants will have an opportunity to explore its various features. By the end of the session, participants will be able to do the following: Articulate the value of OERs for faculty use Access the open educational resource with their own device(s) Explore the features of the resource Assess the value of the resource for their own contexts Provide feedback which will help inform further development of the resource This presentation aligns with the following Colloquium Sub-Themes: Opening Up Connection, Engagement, and Exploration Current Trend
Laser Sourced Computed Tomography
No full textComputed tomography (CT) has been used for decades by medical professionals to detect and diagnose various injuries and ailments. CT scanners are teeming with interesting physics, but due to their bulk, cost and safety, hands on experience with a medical CT scanner is unrealistic for undergraduate students. Therefore, an operationally similar, yet small, safe and inexpensive CT scanner is desirable. This poster details the design and operation of one such apparatus. First, the medical CT’s X-rays were replaced by light, a far safer type of radiation. A 5-mW laser was the light source and a photodetector sensed the light once it has passed through a scan subject. Pyrex glass was chosen as the scan object. Glass was used because a key property of CT scanning is to differentiate densities by their absorption characteristics, so scanning an object which obscures the laser light is not sufficiently similar to medical CT. A consequence of that choice was that laser light interacting with glass resulted in significant refraction. In order to minimize the refraction, the glass was bathed in mineral oil, which has the same index of refraction as Pyrex. With that taken care of, the next step was image reconstruction. Keeping in line with the low-cost goal the image reconstruction program was written in R, an open source programming language. The program takes data from the absorption of the light transmitted through the object at various positions and forms an image based on locations of high or low absorption
The Effects of Anxiety on Cognitive Function in Older Adults
No full textRecent research suggests that working memory capacity, which declines with age, is a key moderator of anxiety and cognitive performance. Specifically, older adults with age-related cognitive decline are more vulnerable to the negative effects of anxiety – mainly, decreasing attention control and short-term memory capacity. The relationship between cognitive function and anxiety may be a key issue for older populations as cognitive assessments may induce anxiety, undermining the accurate diagnosis of their cognitive abilities. Our aim is to examine the relationship between anxiety and cognitive function in healthy older adults compared to young adults.
For this purpose, we recruited 20 young adults (18-25 yrs) and 16 older adults (65-70 yrs). All participants completed a State-Trait Anxiety Inventory questionnaire (STAI-6), and performed cognitive assessments which included the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT3), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and Trail Making Tests (TMT) A and B. Additionally, an eye-tracking task, measuring antisaccade responses, was also implemented to examine inhibitory errors in two experimental blocks: (memory) delay and attention. Linear regression analysis was used to compare inhibition errors, anxiety scores and cognitive scores across age groups.
This study uniquely examined the relationship between anxiety and cognitive function during ecologically valid cognitive assessments in older adult populations. Our results show the distinct effects of anxiety between young adults and older adults and how these changes may be influenced by varying cognitive abilities. It also highlights the links between anxiety and cognitive function (attention and working memory), measured by objective and reliable eye-tracking methods
Children\u27s Ability to Act as Alibi Witnesses for Adults
No full textAlibi research is a relatively new topic in forensic psychology, and there is a dearth of research on child alibi witnesses. An alibi is a report of one’s own whereabouts and activities during a given timeframe, and an alibi witness is someone who can confirm this information. The lack of mature cognitive abilities such as attention and memory may hinder children in providing alibi witness statements. This study investigated children’s ability to act as alibi witnesses, as no prior research has addressed this topic. Eighty-three children (M age = 7.1 years) participated in a 2 (Researcher presence: Leave, No Leave) x 2 (Delay: No Delay, 1-Day Delay) between subjects study design. Two research assistants, one male and one female, led a series of science games for approximately 45 minutes, and this occurred either directly before or one day before participants were interviewed. Because this research is exploratory in nature, specific hypotheses were not developed. Though only the female research assistant ever left the room (in the Leave condition), children’s reports of whether or not a research assistant left did not differ between the male (77% of children said the male did not leave) and female (63% of children said the female did not leave) research assistants, z = 1.40, p = .16. Further, the difference in reports of leaving in the Leave (19%) versus No Leave (8%) conditions did not differ statistically significantly, z = 1.70, p = .08. These findings indicate that children may be poor alibi witnesses
Pixie Transceiver
No full textA 7MHz (40m band) radio transceiver was constructed and tested. The transceiver was tested and characterized for power consumption, output, transmission distance, interference, signal gain, and attenuation on the antenna. Upon completion of successful testing the transceiver will be then miniaturized using surface mount technology. Surface mount components should decrease the area and also reduce interference in the circuit. The project is meant to provide a low cost, interesting, surface mount project for future students
Burglary Prediction using Synthetic Training Data for Supervised Machine Learning
No full textIncredible amounts of crime data are freely available to the public through open data initiatives. These data sets give the time and general location of hundreds of thousands of crime reports. This wealth of well-labeled information is ideal for Supervised Machine Learning, allowing for analysis and prediction to help future civic planning and law enforcement. Unfortunately, these data sets have flaws that make them challenging to use with Machine Learning methods. To predict future burglaries, both example homes that have been burgled, as well as example homes that have not been burgled are needed. As no city records locations where a crime has not occurred, only half the picture needed to make predictions exists.
To solve this problem, we constructed a set of synthetically generated times and locations that do not correspond with known burglary reports, but accurately represent the geography and distribution of buildings within the city. By combining these synthetic points with the real crime data, a complete picture is formed and a predictive model can be trained. Additional features were combined with these locations. For Vancouver, this included weather and lighting data from Environment Canada, and the local density of street trees, traffic signals, and light poles from the Vancouver Open Data Portal. The resulting Machine Learning model was able to correctly classify more than 80% of burglaries in this data.
The ability to generate Synthetic Training Data cheaply and quickly can be a major boon to fields such as Computational Criminology, where one-sided sets of data like this are common, lacking the whole picture needed for common Machine Learning tools
Isolation and Characterization of Microvesicles in Blood Plasma by Size-exclusion Chromatography
No full textExtracellular vesicles (EVs) (50 nm to 2 μm) are a heterogeneous collection of membrane-enclosed structures that are located in the extracellular space and released from the surface of many different cell types into different bodily fluids. EVs includes exosomes (30-100nm), apoptotic bodies (\u3e1000 nm), and microvesicles (100 nm-1000nm) which may deliver bioactive cargo such as lipids, signaling molecules, growth factors, mRNA and non-coding mRNA that are released from the cell of origin to their target cells. Recent studies demonstrate that plasma-derived microvesicles may play a role in cell-cell communication, may potentially be diagnostic, or are even prognostic biomarkers of diseases. However, to establish any of these roles for MVs, we need to be able to isolate them from blood plasma easily without contamination by proteins and lipids that are quite abundant. Therefore, isolating extracellular vesicles from blood will be of great importance in understanding their biological role and to use EVs as biomarkers of disease. In this study, we built size exclusion chromatography columns and then used them to isolate MVs from platelets-free blood plasma samples and assessed their effectiveness compared to typical centrifugation protocols. We measured the protein concentrations of each eluted fractions and found that fractions 19-26 had a higher protein concentration and, as expected, protein content gradually increased with each fraction. Using flow cytometry, we enumerated CD41+ (platelet) and CD62e+ (endothelial) derived MVs. Unlike protein, fractions 9-12 contained the highest concentrations of the platelet-derived vesicles similar to previous studies. In conclusion, our custom-made size exclusion chromatography column performed as expected and separated blood plasma MVs from proteins effectively
Development of Directed Lateral Lithiation Reactions for Use in Advanced Undergraduate Experiments
No full textDirected lithiation reactions involving aromatic compounds containing a “directing group” have become an essential method for the synthesis of a variety of aromatic compounds that are difficult to synthesize by other methods. Many of these compounds have found important applications in industry, especially in the synthesis of pharmaceutical drugs and technologically advanced materials such as liquid crystals. Our research involves the development of examples of the above named class of reactions suitable for use as organic synthesis projects at the advanced undergraduate laboratory level. A series of these reactions and the compounds synthesized will be described, along with detailed results of the characterization of the various compounds
Capillary Electrophoretic Simultaneous Separation of Bisphenol Analogues
No full textBisphenol A (BPA) and its structural analogues are used in the production of polycarbonate plastics, epoxy resins, and personal care products. Some of these analogues including BPA, BPS, and BPF are proven to have endocrine disruptive effects in humans and animal species in very low concentrations. Many studies have reported bisphenols as an environmental contaminant, showing increased concentrations in air, water, soil, sediment, and organism tissues. The attempt to replace BPA with structural bisphenol analogues such as, BPAF, BPF, BPP, BPS, and BPZ has resulted in increased concern with these unstudied compounds and their effects on the body and environment. This project sought to optimize a simultaneous separation method for 13 bisphenol analogues (BPA, BPAF, BPB, BPBP, BPC, BPE, BPF, BPFL, BPG, BPM, BPP, BPA, BPZ) using capillary electrophoresis. The optimization of experimental parameters such as pH, concentration of buffer, applied voltage, and the addition of organic modifiers including methanol, ß-cyclodextrin, and acetonitrile was explored. This method was designed with the goal that it could be coupled with extraction methods of suspected bisphenol-containing products and successfully separating and identifying the analogues present