Using plagiarism detection tools in order to control group work submissions in large courses

Peer education and teamwork are looked upon as important educational tools due to the massificationof higher education programmes. As such, teams frequently produce several deliverables throughouta given course, and these should be properly organized and assessed.As the deliverables submission process often occur in large numbers, any attempt to manage theprocedure too tightly is bound to make the evaluators spend a lot of time just checking, controlling andcorrecting each individual submissi...

Managing team work submissions in large moodle courses in order to generate course portfolios

- Massification of higher education institution promotesthe importance of peer education and team work as importanteducational tools. As such, teams frequently produce severaldeliverables that should be organized and evaluated throughout agiven course. Some submissions should then be attributed to theteam rather than the individual and searching for a given type ofdeliverable from a given team becomes an important concern interms of organization and ease of usage in evaluatingassignments. The...

The U.Porto e-learning cafe: Learning Spaces and the Path of Self Education

In the European Higher Education Area "learning" is a key word as well as individual responsibility and engagement with self education. Universities are facing demanding challenges mainly due to the rising of life-long-learning needs, to significant cuts on public budgets and to strong pressures to achieve increasing levels of excellence both in education and research. In a globalized society where information and communication technologies (ICT) play a major role, employers require that coll...

Sodium salicylate prevents paraquat-induced apoptosis in the rat lung

The nonselective contact herbicide, paraquat (PQ), is a strong pneumotoxicant, especially due to its accumulation in the lung through a polyamine uptake system and to its capacity to induce redox cycling, leading to oxidative stress-related damage. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the occurrence of apoptotic events in the lungs of male Wistar rats, 24, 48, and 96 h after PQ exposure (25 mg/kg ip) as well as the putative healing effects provided by sodium salicylate [(NaSAL), 200 ...