University education is expensive, and may be priced out of range for low-income and middle income students. Here comes the important concept of funding model for university education. Across the world, there are three main funding models for university education: (i) private (full fee) model, (ii) public model, and (iii) public (subsidized) model. In the … More Funding model of university education
University teaching is dominated by two main educational modes: lecture and tutorials. Lectures are delivered in big classrooms that seat hundreds of students, and is used primarily to deliver the main content of the course. Tutorials, on the other hand, serve to reinforce learning of concepts, and demonstrate the use of these concepts in problem-solving. … More University tutorials reinforce learning of concepts, and demonstrate the application of lecture material to problem-solving
The past twenty years has witnessed rapid technological changes amidst a world that is increasingly complex and rapidly changing. This place new challenges in our educational system as we seek to prepare students to work productively in the new world as well as equipped with learning skills to continuously upgrade themselves through self-learning in their … More Complex and varied environment in the modern world prompted the infusion of liberal arts education and lateral thinking in university courses
Reflecting on my undergraduate education, I think the seminar style classes in the arts and social sciences domain are the most difficult classes to learn and distill knowledge from. Specifically, my curriculum at the National University of Singapore about 20 years ago require about 3-4 arts and social sciences courses, which are taught using the … More Seminar style classes are the most difficult to learn and distill knowledge from
As mentioned in my previous blog post, liberal arts courses are slowly being featured in many engineering and natural sciences curriculum. But, what kind of benefits do these courses offer us? The key advantage here is that liberal arts courses are designed to expand the lateral thinking capabilities of the student. Specifically, students are taught … More Liberal arts courses expand the students’ thinking capabilities and capacities beyond the confines of the specialist major curriculum
Each journal has its mission, scope, and target audience. For example, a journal in bioseparation is a specialist journal interested in communicating research findings in the area of using different separation technologies for separating and purifying biomolecules from complex fermentation broth. Hence, its scope is everything relevant to using separation techniques to separate biomolecules in … More Checking journal’s scope and target audience is crucial to avoid “rejected without peer review”
When I was doing my masters’ research thesis, I had the opportunity to read through some of the classic papers in molecular biology revolving on understanding the mechanisms of transcription and translation. Comparing the complexity of the papers in the 1950s and 1960s with now, would reveal that research has become more complex, and involved … More Modern Ph.D. thesis research is more complex and extended
Journals is the primary platform for disseminating new research findings and communicating them to the wider public and scientific community. Similar to a newspaper or magazine, there is a chief editor for each journal in the world. The duties of the chief editor include managing new journal article submissions, running the journal operations, as well … More Professional editors could put in more effort into developing a journal in new directions
Initial melting step in quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) is essential to separate the double stranded DNA into single stranded DNA in preparation for PCR. Naturally, the longer the DNA segment, the more energy is needed to separate the strands, and thus, a longer melting time at the same melting temperature of 95 oC is … More Longer DNA segment needs longer initial melting time for qPCR applications
Each piece of research is dependent on a set of analytical methods that helped the researchers to make the necessary measurements to understand the phenomena under study. These methods constitute the “Materials and methods” section of the journal article. However, there is a recent trend of relegating the “Materials and methods” section to the back … More Space constraints in top journals has pushed the Materials and methods section to the back of the journal article
Looking at life with a scientific lens 