Preparing for your first teaching experience is a process. Once you’ve decided the topic, well-written “objectives” will help you create a “lesson plan” that can make all the difference in your teaching success.
Based on the work of Robert F. Meager, Heather Dowd, Instructional Designer at Sauk Valley Community College, has put together this brief and concise presentation on using the ABCD Method for writing objectives.
Check out Heather’s presentation on Slideshare:
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Background
When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), the goal was to support research that utilizes metagenomics approaches to determine the role and function of microorganisms in our lives; it’s a pathway that is expected to produce exiting new discoveries about human development and health (National Institutes of Health, 2009). In a way, The HMP is like the sequel to the Human Genome Project, for it was through the use of techniques developed during the quest to map the human genome that scientists discovered massive amounts of genetic material in our bodies that couldn’t be associated with any function of our human genome!
By analyzing samples from the environment, a community or an individual for these extra particles of RNA (ribonucleic acid) or DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) researchers were able to apply methods like sequencing technology, gene assembly and bioinformatics to determine that micro-organisms were responsible for the genetic material they found. Thus, the science of metagenomics was born. Through metagenomic research, we now know that our human bodies are host to trillions of microorganisms, the vast majority of which have never been detected on the human body, that augment our human genome and endow our bodies with functions they are unable to perform on their own.
Until the advent of metagenomic science, all of these microbes in our human biome went undetected because they’ve never been isolated in the laboratory using the standard culturing techniques that most of us learned in Microbiology 101 and have been the postulates of microbiology for over 100 years. In fact, standard culturing methods identify a mere 20% of the 400-500 distinct phylotypes of bacteria that we now know to compose our human microbiome. This is significant because these ‘newly discovered’ bacteria contribute massive amounts of genetic material to our inherited genome, yet we only know the source and, more importantly, function of a small portion of that material.
National Institutes of Health. (2009, February 20). Human Microbiome Project. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from NIH Roadmap for Medical Research: http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/hmp/
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