Lecture on Michael’s Domain

Our first OER (Open Educational Resource)

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When I started my new position at the Faculty of Pharmacy, it was clear that I would be going to do more formal teaching than before. Even though I have lectured before, I typically was only modifying a conference presentation in which I presented the research work from our laboratory. However, that does not fly for undergraduate students, and hence I am assembling lectures from scratch. Although there is much hype about Open Science, there are few or no open educational resources for the topics that I know to teach: genetic and protein engineering, protein drugs, biologics. Because I think, that there should be more openly available teaching material, I decided to make my lectures openly available. However, I soon realized that it is very difficult to replace copyrighted material with free alternatives such as public domain or Creative Commons -licensed material. 80% of the images and illustrations are easy to replace, the next 15% take you as much time as the first 80%, and for the last few images it seems impossible to find copyright-unencumbered alternatives. In the end, I generated the lion share of material myself. For this specific lecture, I have not found any usable image of Judah Folkman . Needless to say that if money was not an issue, I could just buy one for a few hundred bucks, but it still would not be possible for others to reuse it. As a temporary solution, I drew an image myself. I am not good at drawing, help me out it if you can!Today, I have finally uploaded my first lecture to the Library of Open Educational Resources : https://aoe.fi/#/materiaali/1212 . It was an introductory lecture to Protein Drug Discovery & Development for BSc students of Pharmacy (course PROV-105), which dates back to September 9th, 2020. The Library of Open educational Resources is maintained by the Finnish Ministry of Education. I also made an entry to Merlot collection (which is perhaps the biggest OER catalog): https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=773405613.However , I am not entirely satisfied with the situation, since I prepared the lecture using Google Slides. Why Google slides? Sadly, it is the only functioning real-time collaborative presentation software. Due to this, the original version of the lecture slides is not available from aoe.fi. However, there is a link to the Google Slides. I have obviously included the same presentation in PDF and ODF format after converting it and all the editable source files (mostly in SVG format). And if the collaborative online editing of LibreOffice should finally become usable, we will probably switch to using that instead of Google Slides. The live online version is the more useful resource. In addition to the fact that this is the original version of the slide show, it will be also updated regularly (since I will give this lecture repeatedly), while the uploaded PDF/ODF file will become more and more obsolete over time.UPDATEI have meanwhile managed to upload another lecture to https://aoe.fi . All of my future contributions will be available from my collection page .* *

Protein Drug Discovery & Development

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I had my first Zoom lecture about protein drug discovery and development. I hope that the students did get at least something out of it. My goal is to cc-license the complete presentation but there are still a few images that I need to replace. A first attempt is rarely a great performance, and we had our fair share of technical problems. My headset failed for the first time since I bought it at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. And the Zoom polling functionality disappeared before the students had any chance to use it and we did not manage to bring it up again.Here is the link to the live Google Slides: https://mjlab.fi/pddd . These will keep changing (= improving). Below you find the PDF snapshot of the presentation from the actual lecture day. The whole presentation is CC-licensed. So feel free to reuse it. All source files (mostly in Inkscape SVG format) are also available from here: https://mjlab.fi/pddd-files . I have done all the SVG files in Inkscape , but you can also open them in any browser or edit them in Adobe Illustrator. If you want to edit or extract images, the easiest is perhaps to download the presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, LibreOffice Impress, or PDF format. I still have not figured out how to share the Google Slides presentation without making the original editable for everyone (after all, I need some control over the content of my lectures).Be aware, that at this moment, the presentation still contains eight images on Fair Use or with unknown licensing terms (even though the legal concept of fair use does not really exist outside the USA). All image sources (excluding my own images) are listed in the file README.txt with their respective licenses and source URLs. Some images are so old that I was not anymore able to locate their original URLs. Hence I am not sure about their licensing terms. I will replace these over the next few weeks when I manage to get hold of CC-licensed or public domain equivalents.

Cell-based assays (Protein Interaction Biochemistry 2018)

Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A lecture about cell-based assays to determine and quantify protein interactions (part of the 2018 course Protein Interaction Biochemistry). Contains also a short introduction to ITC (isothermal calorimetry). CC-licensed.