Background: Scientific education aims to be inclusive and to improve students learning achievements, through appropriate teaching and learning. Problem Based Learning (PBL) system, a student centered method, started in the second half of the previous century and is expanding progressively, organizes learning around problems and students learn about a subject through the experience of solving these problems.Objectives:To assess the opinions of undergraduate medical students regarding learning outcomes of PBL in small group teaching and to explore their views about the role of tutors and methods of evaluation. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study.Methods: This study was conducted in Kerbala Medical Colleges among second year students. A self-administered questionnaire was prepared to evaluate the newly applied teaching system. The study analysis included simple descriptive analysis and determining association through t-test, chi square test and regression analysis and using structural equation models to determine simultaneous association between different students’ demographic characteristics and potential predictors using SPSS-20 and Amos software at a significance level of < 0.05.Results:A total of 131 undergraduate medical students participated in the study with a response rate of 94%. The majority (93%) have indicated that PBL strategy contributed effectively to their knowledge development with a similar majority (92%) considering PBL successful new teaching method. About 86% reported that would choose PBL rather than conventional method and also 86% would advise PBL for others. Similarly, high majority indicated that various PBL activities are essential. Regarding the tutors’ role in PBL, the majority (92%) indicated that this role was positive and fundamental. According to two thirds (68%) of participants PBL application in Kerbala Medical college was very good application while a higher majority described various PBL sessions as successful and positive and fundamental role of tutors was stressed by most students.Conclusions: This study highlighted the benefits of soliciting student impressions of effective small group teaching. The students’ emphasized group atmosphere and facilitation skills of tutor in learning.Key words: Problem Based Learning, Medical Education, Small Group Teaching, Team Based Learning, Kerbala Medical College
Interleukins (IL-2 and IL-4) are increased in asthmatics and were reported to induce resistance to steroid therapy in some patients who fail to get benefit from glucocorticoids when used in full dose and for long period of time. In this context, the present study was conducted on Iraqi patients to provide additional laboratory mean, beside the clinical diagnosis, for the decision whether the asthma is steroid sensitive or resistant by monitoring the level of immunoglobulins, complement proteins and interleukins among asthmatic patients (steroid sensitive or resistant) and the possible contribution of other factors like age, sex and environments in the development of steroid resistance. A total number of 55 asthmatics and 28 normal subjec
... Show MoreB3LYP/6-31G, DFT method was applied to hypothetical study the design of six carbon nanotube materials based on [8]circulene, through the use of cyclic polymerization of two and three molecules of [8]circulene. Optimized structures of [8]circulene have saddle-shaped. Design of six carbon nanotubes reactions were done by thermodynamically calculating (Δ S, Δ G and Δ H) and the stability of these hypothetical nanotubes depending on the value of HOMO energy level. Nanotubes obtained have the most efficient gap energy, making them potentially useful for solar cell applications.
In this work a chemical sensor was built by using Plane Wave Expansion (PWE) modeling technique by filling the core of 1550 hollow core photonic crystal fiber with chloroform that has different concentrations after being diluted with distilled water. The minimum photonic bandgap width is.0003 and .0005 rad/sec with 19 and 7 cells respectively and a concentration of chloroform that filled these two fibers is 75%.
Abstract
This paper presents mechanical and electrical design, and implementation process of industrial robot, 3-DoF type SCARA (selective compliment assembly robot arm),with two rotations and one translation used for welding applications.The design process also included the controller design which was based on PLC(programmable logic controller) as well as selection of mechanical and electrical components.The challenge was to use the available components in Iraq with reasonable costs. The robot mentioned is fully automated using programmable logic controller PLC(Zelio type SR3-B261BD),with 16inputs and 10 outputs. The PLC was implemented in FBD logic to obtain three different automatic motions with hi
... Show MoreLeishmaniasis is one of the important parasitic diseases, affecting mainly low social class people indeveloping countries, and is more prevalent and endemic in the tropical and subtropical regions of old worldand new world. Despite ofbroad distribution in Iraq,little known about the geneticcharacteristics of thecausative agents. So this study was aimed to evaluate the genetic varietyoftwo IraqiLeishmaniatropicaisolatesbased on heat shock protein gene sequence 70 (HSP70) in comparison with universal isolates recordedsequences data. After amplification and sequencing of HSP70 gene,the obtainedresults were alignment alongwith homologous Leishmania sequences retrieved from NCBI by using BLAST. The analysis results showedpresence of particular g
... Show MoreThe Internet of Things (IoT) is an information network that connects gadgets and sensors to allow new autonomous tasks. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the integration of IoT with industrial applications. Some vital infrastructures, such as water delivery networks, use IIoT. The scattered topology of IIoT and resource limits of edge computing provide new difficulties to traditional data storage, transport, and security protection with the rapid expansion of the IIoT. In this paper, a recovery mechanism to recover the edge network failure is proposed by considering repair cost and computational demands. The NP-hard problem was divided into interdependent major and minor problems that could be solved in polynomial t
... Show MoreImage databases are increasing exponentially because of rapid developments in social networking and digital technologies. To search these databases, an efficient search technique is required. CBIR is considered one of these techniques. This paper presents a multistage CBIR to address the computational cost issues while reasonably preserving accuracy. In the presented work, the first stage acts as a filter that passes images to the next stage based on SKTP, which is the first time used in the CBIR domain. While in the second stage, LBP and Canny edge detectors are employed for extracting texture and shape features from the query image and images in the newly constructed database. The p
Photonic Crystal Fiber Interferometers (PCFIs) are greatly used
for sensing applications. This work presents the fabrication and
characterization of a relative humidity sensor based on Mach-
Zehnder Interferometer (MZI), which operates in reflection mode.
The humidity sensor operation based on the adsorption and
desorption of water vapour at the silica-air interface within the PCF.
The fabrication of this sensor is simple, it only includes splicing and
cleaving the PCF with SMF.PCF (LMA-10) with a certain length
spliced to SMF (Corning-28).
The spectrum of PCFI exhibits good sensitivity to humidity
variations. The PCFI response is observed for a range of humidity
values from (27% RH to 85% RH), the positi