TY - GEN A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Wilkins, Christian A1 - Hagedorn, Christiane A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - The Gamification of a MOOC Platform T2 - Proceedings of 2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) N2 - Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have left their mark on the face of education during the recent years. At the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany, we are actively developing a MOOC platform, which provides our research with a plethora of e-learning topics, such as learning analytics, automated assessment, peer assessment, team-work, online proctoring, and gamification. We run several instances of this platform. On openHPI, we provide our own courses from within the HPI context. Further instances are openSAP, openWHO, and mooc.HOUSE, which is the smallest of these platforms, targeting customers with a less extensive course portfolio. In 2013, we started to work on the gamification of our platform. By now, we have implemented about two thirds of the features that we initially have evaluated as useful for our purposes. About a year ago we activated the implemented gamification features on mooc.HOUSE. Before activating the features on openHPI as well, we examined, and re-evaluated our initial considerations based on the data we collected so far and the changes in other contexts of our platforms. KW - MOOC KW - Gamification KW - e-learning KW - Massive Open Online Courses Y1 - 2017 SN - 978-1-5090-5467-1 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2017.7942952 SN - 2165-9567 SP - 883 EP - 892 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Teusner, Ralf A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - MOOCs in Secondary Education BT - Experiments and Observations from German Classrooms T2 - 2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) N2 - Computer science education in German schools is often less than optimal. It is only mandatory in a few of the federal states and there is a lack of qualified teachers. As a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) provider with a German background, we developed the idea to implement a MOOC addressing pupils in secondary schools to fill this gap. The course targeted high school pupils and enabled them to learn the Python programming language. In 2014, we successfully conducted the first iteration of this MOOC with more than 7000 participants. However, the share of pupils in the course was not quite satisfactory. So we conducted several workshops with teachers to find out why they had not used the course to the extent that we had imagined. The paper at hand explores and discusses the steps we have taken in the following years as a result of these workshops. KW - MOOC KW - Secondary Education KW - School KW - Teamwork KW - K-12 KW - Programming course KW - Java KW - Python Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-1-5386-9506-7 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2019.8725138 SN - 2165-9567 SP - 173 EP - 182 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Graded Team Assignments in MOOCs BT - Effects of Team Composition and Further Factors on Team Dropout Rates and Performance T2 - SCALE N2 - The ability to work in teams is an important skill in today's work environments. In MOOCs, however, team work, team tasks, and graded team-based assignments play only a marginal role. To close this gap, we have been exploring ways to integrate graded team-based assignments in MOOCs. Some goals of our work are to determine simple criteria to match teams in a volatile environment and to enable a frictionless online collaboration for the participants within our MOOC platform. The high dropout rates in MOOCs pose particular challenges for team work in this context. By now, we have conducted 15 MOOCs containing graded team-based assignments in a variety of topics. The paper at hand presents a study that aims to establish a solid understanding of the participants in the team tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to determine which team compositions are particularly successful. Finally, we examine how several modifications to our platform's collaborative toolset have affected the dropout rates and performance of the teams. KW - Teamwork KW - MOOCs KW - Team-based Learning KW - Team Assessment KW - Peer Assessment KW - Project-based learning Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-1-4503-6804-9 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3330430.3333619 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Staubitz, Thomas A1 - Meinel, Christoph T1 - Collaborative Learning in MOOCs - Approaches and Experiments T2 - 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference N2 - This Research-to-Practice paper examines the practical application of various forms of collaborative learning in MOOCs. Since 2012, about 60 MOOCs in the wider context of Information Technology and Computer Science have been conducted on our self-developed MOOC platform. The platform is also used by several customers, who either run their own platform instances or use our white label platform. We, as well as some of our partners, have experimented with different approaches in collaborative learning in these courses. Based on the results of early experiments, surveys amongst our participants, and requests by our business partners we have integrated several options to offer forms of collaborative learning to the system. The results of our experiments are directly fed back to the platform development, allowing to fine tune existing and to add new tools where necessary. In the paper at hand, we discuss the benefits and disadvantages of decisions in the design of a MOOC with regard to the various forms of collaborative learning. While the focus of the paper at hand is on forms of large group collaboration, two types of small group collaboration on our platforms are briefly introduced. KW - MOOC KW - Collaborative learning KW - Peer assessment KW - Team based assignment KW - Teamwork Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5386-1174-6 SN - 0190-5848 PB - IEEE CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Stanke, S. A1 - Wenger, C. A1 - Bier, Frank Fabian A1 - Hölzel, Ralph T1 - Dielectrophoretic functionalization of nanoelectrode arrays for the detection of influenza viruses T2 - European biophysics journal : with biophysics letters ; an international journal of biophysics Y1 - 2017 SN - 0175-7571 SN - 1432-1017 VL - 46 SP - S337 EP - S337 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Sprinz, Detlef F. ED - Luterbacher, Urs ED - Sprinz, Detlef F. T1 - Our Conclusions T2 - Global Climate Policy: Actors, Concepts, and Enduring Challenges Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-0-262-53534-2 SN - 978-0-262-03792-1 SP - 323 EP - 335 PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - GEN A1 - Spahn, Frank A1 - Seiss, Martin T1 - Charges dropped T2 - Nature physics Y1 - 2015 SN - 1745-2473 SN - 1745-2481 VL - 11 IS - 9 SP - 709 EP - 710 PB - Nature Publ. Group CY - London ER - TY - GEN A1 - Sowemimo, Oluwakemi A1 - Borcherds, Wade A1 - Knox-Brown, Patrick A1 - Rindfleisch, Tobias A1 - Thalhammer, Anja A1 - Daughdrill, Gary T1 - Evolution of Transient Helicity and Disorder in Late Embryogenesis Abundant Protein COR15A T2 - Biophysical journal N2 - Cold regulated protein 15A (COR15A) is a nuclear encoded, intrinsically disordered protein that is found in Arabidopsis thaliana. It belongs to the Late Embryogenesis Abundant (LEA) family of proteins and is responsible for increased freezing tolerance in plants. COR15A is intrinsically disordered in dilute solutions and adopts a helical structure upon dehydration or in the presence of co-solutes such as TFE and ethylene glycol. This helical structure is thought to be important for protecting plants from dehydration induced by freezing. Multiple protein sequence alignments revealed the presence of several conserved glycine residues that we hypothesize keeps COR15A from becoming helical in dilute solutions. Using AGADIR, the change in helical content of COR15A when these conserved glycine residues were mutated to alanine residues was predicted. Based on the predictions, glycine to alanine mutants were made at position 68, and 54,68,81, and 84. Labeled samples of wildtype COR15A and mutant proteins were purified and NMR experiments were performed to examine any structural changes induced by the mutations. To test the effects of dehydration on the structure of COR15A, trifluoroethanol, an alcohol based co solvent that is proposed to induce/stabilize helical structure in peptides was added to the NMR samples, and the results of the experiment showed an increase in helical content, compared to the samples without TFE. To test the functional differences between wild type and the mutants, liposome leakage assays were performed. The results from these assays suggest the more helical mutants may augment membrane stability. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2018.11.2553 SN - 0006-3495 SN - 1542-0086 VL - 116 IS - 3 SP - 473A EP - 473A PB - Cell Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - GEN A1 - Sommer, Michael A1 - Augustin, Jürgen A1 - Kleber, M. T1 - Feedbacks of soil erosion on SOC patterns and carbon dynamics in agricultural landscapes-The CarboZALF experiment T2 - Journal of real-time image processing Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.still.2015.09.015 SN - 0167-1987 SN - 1879-3444 VL - 156 SP - 182 EP - 184 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Smith, Taylor A1 - Bookhagen, Bodo T1 - Using passive microwave data to understand spatio-temporal trends and dynamics in snow-water storage in High Mountain Asia T2 - active and passive microwave remote sensing for environmental monitoring II N2 - High Mountain Asia provides water for more than a billion downstream users. Many catchments receive the majority of their yearly water budget in the form of snow - the vast majority of which is not monitored by sparse weather networks. We leverage passive microwave data from the SSMI series of satellites (SSMI, SSMI/S, 1987-2016), reprocessed to 3.125 km resolution, to examine trends in the volume and spatial distribution of snow-water equivalent (SWE) in the Indus Basin. We find that the majority of the Indus has seen an increase in snow-water storage. There exists a strong elevation-trend relationship, where high-elevation zones have more positive SWE trends. Negative trends are confined to the Himalayan foreland and deeply-incised valleys which run into the Upper Indus. This implies a temperature-dependent cutoff below which precipitation increases are not translated into increased SWE. Earlier snowmelt or a higher percentage of liquid precipitation could both explain this cutoff.(1) Earlier work 2 found a negative snow-water storage trend for the entire Indus catchment over the time period 1987-2009 (-4 x 10(-3) mm/yr). In this study based on an additional seven years of data, the average trend reverses to 1.4 x 10(-3). This implies that the decade since the mid-2000s was likely wetter, and positively impacted long-term SWE trends. This conclusion is supported by an analysis of snowmelt onset and end dates which found that while long-term trends are negative, more recent (since 2005) trends are positive (moving later in the year).(3) KW - Passive Microwave KW - Snow KW - Climate Change KW - High Mountain Asia Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-1-5106-2160-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2323827 SN - 0277-786X SN - 1996-756X VL - 10788 PB - SPIE-INT Soc Optical Engineering CY - Bellingham ER -