All resources in SWAYAM "OER for Empowering Teachers"

Vacuum - An Introduction

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In order to get introduced with Vacuum, this module has been designed for the undergraduate students studying Physics. The content has been taken form the Online resources. The purpose of this module is to learn how to prepare a module. Hence, it may not be a professional one.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Anandan P

Schizophrenia, Not a Psychotic Disorder: Bleuler Revisited

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Current diagnostic criteria delineate schizophrenia as a discrete entity essentially defined by positive symptoms. However, the role of positive symptoms in psychiatry is being questioned. There is compelling evidence that psychotic manifestations are expressed in the population in a continuum of varying degrees of severity, ranging from normality to full-blown psychosis. In most cases, these phenomena do not persist, but they constitute risk factors for psychiatric disorders in general. Psychotic symptoms are also present in most non-psychotic psychiatric diagnoses, being a marker of severity. Research revealed that hallucinations and delusions appear to have distinct, independent biological underpinnings—in the general population, in psychotic, and in non-psychotic disorders as well. On the other hand, negative symptoms were seen to be far more restricted to schizophrenia, have other underlying pathophysiology than positive symptoms, predict outcome and treatment response in schizophrenia, and start before the first psychotic outbreak. The current work discusses the concept of schizophrenia, suggesting that a greater emphasis should be put on cases where psychotic symptoms emerge in a premorbid subtly increasing negative/cognitive symptoms background. In those cases, psychosis would have a different course and outcome while psychosis occurring in the absence of such background deterioration would be more benign—probably having no, or a milder, underlying degenerative process. This reformulation should better drive psychopathological classification, face positive symptoms as epiphenomenon of the schizophrenia process, and dishevel stigma from schizophrenia and from delusions and hallucinations.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Loch Alexandre Andrade

Basic Writing/Public Affairs Writing

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Public affairs writing is the term used for publications written with the need of expressing opinions, ideas or concerns to a targeted audience. It is also used simply as a source of informing. Some common forms of public affairs writing include letters to the newspaper editor, letters to the government official, or e-mails and blogs. The content is written with the goal to inform or persuade the audience.

Material Type: Reading

School Library Learning 2.0

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Welcome to School Library Learning 2.0. This tutorial is brought to you by the California School Library Association (CSLA) 2.0 Team. You will learn the tools of the new Internet: Web 2.0 tools that are bringing our kids in touch with the entire world through social networking, wikis, video, podcasting, and gaming sites. The exercises give you the background you need to understand the tools you're learning about.

Material Type: Activity/Lab

Author: Helene Blowers

Open Educational Resources

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Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.

Material Type: Homework/Assignment

Authors: How Can Technology Advance Open Educational Resources, Oer Technology Infrastructure Assessment, Years Of Oer What Funders Can Learn A Historical Moment

PHARMACOLOGY OF PLANT IMMUNOMODULATORS

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The immunomodulators or Rasayana’s (in Ayurveda) are agents used to modulate the immune system and can be obtained from both natural as well as synthetic origin from plants and chemicals respectively. The aim of this review is to highlight the work on pharmacological aspects of plant immunomodulators and also provides the knowledge on the recent pharmacological research update in current year (2011). Plants explained in this review having potential of immunomodulating activity are identified from various sources in the literature. Among these many plants have undergone in vitro as well as in vivo evaluations which are explained in this review including the dose administered of particular plant extract and the mechanism involved in immunomodulation.

Material Type: Module

Author: Vikrant Arya

A Review on Fruits Having Anti-Diabetic Potential

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Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder of the endocrine system. The disease occurs worldwide and its incidence is increasing rapidly in most parts of the world. Moreover, continuous use of the synthetic anti-diabetic drugs causes side effects and toxicity. Therefore, seeking natural and non-toxic anti-diabetic drugs is necessary for diabetic therapy. Medicinal fruits play an important role in the development of potent therapeutic agents. The present paper reviews the data reported on pharmacologically active phytoconstituents obtained from fruits involved in anti-diabetic activity along with pharmacological status which have been experimentally studied for hypoglycaemic activity. This work stimulates the researchers for further research on the potential use of medicinal fruits having anti-diabetic potential.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Vikrant Arya

General Biology

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On the 28th of April 2012 the contents of the English as well as German Wikibooks and Wikipedia projects were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. An URI to this license is given in the list of figures on page 175. If this document is a derived work from the contents of one of these projects and the content was still licensed by the project under this license at the time of derivation this document has to be licensed under the same, a similar or a compatible license, as stated in section 4b of the license. The list of contributors is included in chapter Contributors on page 169. The licenses GPL, LGPL and GFDL are included in chapter Licenses on page 179, since this book and/or parts of it may or may not be licensed under one or more of these licenses, and thus require inclusion of these licenses. The licenses of the figures are given in the list of figures on page 175. This PDF was generated by the LATEX typesetting software. The LATEX source code is included as an attachment (source.7z.txt) in this PDF file. To extract the source from the PDF file, we recommend the use of http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ utility or clicking the paper clip attachment symbol on the lower left of your PDF Viewer, selecting Save Attachment. After extracting it from the PDF file you have to rename it to source.7z. To uncompress the resulting archive we recommend the use of http://www.7-zip.org/. The LATEX source itself was generated by a program written by Dirk Hünniger, which is freely available under an open source license from http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Huenniger/wb2pdf. This distribution also contains a configured version of the pdflatex compiler with all necessary packages and fonts needed to compile the LATEX source included in this PDF file.

Material Type: Lecture Notes

Ayurveda: from traditional use to scientific research

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Ayurveda is the mother of all forms of modern medicine, from body work to surgery. Ayurveda is an ancient time tested method of holistic medicine that supports the individual in finding balance throughout their physiology leading to great levels of health s and happiness. It is well known that the oldest of all the sciences in the world is the science of life, Ayurveda. It is based entirely on herbs and herbal compounds. The scientific method of Modern Science is based on the principle of Observation, Hypothesis / anti-thesis, Experimentation and Proof. Present form of Ayurveda is the outcome of continued scientific inputs that has gone in to the evolution of its principles, theories and protocol of healthy living and disease management. In this paper an attempt has been done to highlight various plants of Ayurveda and their exploration in the scientific research. The evidences of effect of different Ayurvedic plant extracts, formulations (herbal product, bhasmas etc) by in vitro, in vivo studies and clinical trials is extremely helpful in enhancing the wisdom of Ayurveda as evidence-based Indian system of medicine.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Vikrant Arya