A case study of a college-wide first-year undergraduate engineering course

Introductory engineering courses are either programme specific or expose students to engineering as a broad discipline by including materials from various engineering programmes. A common introductory engineering course that spans different engineering programmes raises challenges, including the high cost of resources as well as the lack of background courses of first-year students. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a first-year common engineering course that uses low-cost materials to expose students to a structured engineering design process. The course is explicitly designed to satisfy the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology criteria for engineering programmes. Our experience with the course shows that not only students are able to follow a structured design process successfully but we also believe that most of the ABET criteria are being delivered through the course.     

A self-determination theory into the psychological needs of CALL: Probing EFL teachers’ autobiographical narratives

Education and Information Technologies - Addressing psychological needs in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has a critical role in developing learners’ motivation to use...     

An investigation of the Gregorian chronology of early Islamic history : A Pilot Study

This pilot study presents a lunar and Gregorian chronology of the Sira, that is the biography of the prophet Muhammad. The paper discusses the problems surrounding the chronology of very early Islamic history, namely, the pre‐Hijra era. This history is not covered by the Hijra calendar, and therefore, historians dated its events using other primitive dating systems, resulting in considerable difficulties and inaccuracies when comparing Gregorian dates of this early Islamic history. In order to overcome this problem and establish an accurate chronology of the early Islamic history, the introduction of a new lunar calendar (the Muhammadi calendar) which starts with the birth month and year of the prophet Muhammad, and covers all Islamic history including the pre‐Hijra era, is suggested. The Muhammadi calendar was used to study the earliest three versions of the Sira. All dated events of the Sira were compiled from these sources and presented, for the first time, according to their historical order. The Muhammadi dates of these events were then calculated. For the first time, a computer program was designed to convert the Muliammadi dates to their Christian equivalent. The program was then used to compute the Gregorian dates of the events of the Sira.     

Culture and country choice of international students: evidence from Ghana

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to examine the influence of the cultural elements on international students’ country choice. It also examines whether individual values moderate the influence of cultural elements on the country choice of international students. Drawing upon a sample size of 223, the data was analysed using structural equation modelling technique. Among the five cultural elements, education, language and social institutions were found to have a positive significant influence on the international student’s country choice. When moderated by individual values education was found to be the only key significant value to international students when selecting a country to further their education. The cultural elements should be given much attention by marketers, government and managers of academic institutions. An improvement in the standards of education in developing countries would attract more students from developed countries.     

Optimizing the use of ultrasound to deliver chemotherapeutic agents to cancer cells from polymeric micelles

In this study, we present an artificial neural network (ANN) model that attempts to predict the dynamic release of doxorubicin (Dox) from P105 micelles under different ultrasonic power densities at 20 kHz. The goal is to utilize the developed ANN model in optimizing the ultrasound application to achieve a target drug release at the tumor site by controlling power density and ultrasound duration via an ANN-based model predictive control. The parameters of the controller are then tuned to achieve good reference signal tracking.     

Kinetics of acoustic release of doxorubicin from stabilized and unstabilized micelles and the effect of temperature

Ultrasound is being investigated as a trigger mechanism to deliver high concentrations of chemotherapy drugs to cancerous tissues using polymeric micelles. In this paper, we examined the kinetics of acoustic release of doxorubicin using stabilized and non-stabilized micelles. Kinetic models were used to regress release and re-encapsulation time constants for three different compounds, namely non-stabilized Pluronic^® P105 micelles, P105 micelles stabilized using an interpenetrating network of N,N-diethylacrylamide and micelles formed by PEO-b-poly(NIPAAm-co-HEMA-lactate_n). Results showed that the kinetic release constant (k_r) depends on the micellar system under investigation. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference between re-encapsulation rate constants for stabilized and unstabilized micelles. We hypothesize that k_r depends on the degree of cross-linking or stabilization.