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Higher education has defined merit largely in terms of speed. It rewards not those who learn the most or the best, but those who report their learning back by the deadline, whether that's the time limit for the test or the end of the semester. Resilient learning takes time. More time spent in study results in longer retention, and elapsed time between reinforcements stabilizes learning. The emphasis on speed leads to less retention and less substantive performance. And because different students learn at different rates, inflexible time limits waste time for some while imposing failure on others. Extended time for learning and alternatives to the conventional term could increase the success rates of many students, especially those most disadvantaged by conventional practices.

Synbiotics are mixtures of prebiotics and probiotics that enhance the activity of probiotic bacteria when co-administered to provide greater benefits to the host. Traditionally, the synbiotics that have been discovered enhance gut probiotic strains and are nutritionally complex molecules that survive digestive breakdown until they reach the later stages of the intestinal tract. Here, we screened and identified sugars or sugar substitutes as synbiotics for the oral probiotic strains Streptococcus salivarius BLIS K12 and BLIS M18. Using a modified deferred antagonism assay, we found that 0.5% (w/v) galactose and 2.5% (w/v) raffinose were the best candidates for use as synbiotics with BLIS K12 and M18, as they trigger enhanced antimicrobial activity against a range of bacteria representing species from the mouth, gut, and skin. Using reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR, we found that this enhanced antimicrobial activity was caused by the upregulation of the lantibiotic genes salA, salB, and sal9 in either K12 or M18. This led to the conclusion that either 2.5% (w/v) raffinose or 0.5% (w/v) galactose, respectively, are suitable synbiotics for use in conjunction with BLIS K12 and M18 to enhance probiotic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faculty members who led change initiatives often express frustration at the roadblocks created by other faculty members or groups. In 2009 George Kuh and Stanley Ikenberry undertook a survey of provosts for the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment to explore the state of student learning assessment. They found that "Gaining faculty involvement and support remains a major challenge..." Sixty-six percent of provosts at all institutions said more faculty engagement would be helpful, and "about four-fifths of provosts at doctoral research universities reported greater faculty engagement as their number one challenge". In order to make substantial improvements in colleges and universities, the author stresses the need to understand and address the sources of faculty resistance. He argues that it is necessary to not only design change for institutions but redesign institutions for change. (Contains 15 resources.)

Since the 1980s, advocates for change in higher education have called for double-loop learning. One of the main criticisms of the evaluation of colleges and universities was that they measured inputs rather than the outputs. Higher education now needs to apply the lessons of learning and change to campus leadership and organization.

College students have changed dramatically, and the skills needed for productive employment have changed as well. But colleges and universities have been slow to respond, often innovating in only small ways while leaving the core practices of undergraduate education the same. This article examines the barriers to transformational change in higher education in five categories: structure, information, incentives, finance, and culture. It suggests that the initial approach to overcoming these barriers involves generating better information in the form of feedback concerning student learning processes and outcomes.

The most fundamental problem of colleges is that, in some respects, the people within them don't learn very well. Most faculty, staff, and administrators in higher education genuinely believe in the importance of undergraduate learning and want to improve it. And many colleges innovate a lot, frequently in an effort to make those improvements. But in the domain of its core activities, the college doesn't learn easily. Even experts in learning can't learn in their role as agents of the college. A major part of the explanation concerning learning resides in the nature of colleges and universities as organizations. All organizations, not just educational institutions, operate using a set of tacit assumptions, often invisible even to those within them, about how people in the organization should behave. Organizational theorists Chris Argyris of Harvard University and the late Donald Schon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, following Ross Ashby, a pioneering theorist in cybernetics and artificial intelligence, made an important distinction between two levels of organizational learning: single-loop learning and double-loop learning. The distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning applies to much that people do in higher education. And it explains why most innovations, even those that produce unambiguously good results, fail to transform institutions: most innovations alter action strategies without moving on to make the second loop and reexamine the governing values. In this article, the author discusses double-loop learning as a possible solution to the problem of learning in higher education. (Contains 9 resources.)

Why is it so hard for colleges and universities to change? Why do even innovative institutions that invest considerable time and effort in attempts to improve performance often fall back into long-established patterns? Why is the whole of educational innovation often less than the sum of the parts? Consider three colleges and universities. Technically hypothetical, each exhibits some of the characteristics of many real institutions. All face increasing challenges that are visible in the data that they dutifully collect and report about their own operations. Each institution has been innovative in various ways in its attempts to meet these challenges. But each is hard pressed to say exactly what the results of its innovations have been. All three have a sense of standing at a crossroads, a moment of decision, but none can say very clearly where it is headed.

What are colleges for? What are they supposed to do? Are educators teaching their students how to grub for grades or how to learn in deep lasting ways? These are just some of the questions that the author attempts to explore in this article. An unbiased observer, looking at any organization, would look to its core processes, what its members do, what they get paid for, what it documents and records, and what criteria it uses for changing the way it does things. Colleges, judged by the same standards and by the evidence of their own documentation, aim to have people take classes. What are the classes for? There are a lot of potentially good answers to that question, but most undergraduate colleges do not preserve any information about those answers. What they do preserve--the almost exclusive documentation of their work that survives the class itself--is grades and transcripts. In this article, the author offers a disturbing glimpse at a superficial approach learning institutions may be fostering. He also offers a reflective assessment of a deep approach waiting to be nurtured. (Contains 8 notes.)

Students nowadays are getting mixed messages about the meaning of education. Evidence has emerged that what colleges have been saying to students were not aligned with what colleges have been doing for students. Students found that the values that seemed to drive policy shifted from department to department, course to course, term to term. As a result, a lot of students have reflexively reverted to the lowest common denominator. They have become cynical about "academic values," not because they were born cynics, but because they have suffered from whiplash after trying to keep their eyes on the "real meaning" of all this. The only policy that made sense to them was to look past it all to what was on the other side of the mixed messages: a job. In this article, the author discusses the need for colleges and universities to align their educational policies and practices to their educational goals. The author also discusses how students tend to lose what they have learned when they pursue goals that they do not consider important and valuable for their own sake. (Contains 12 notes.)

Lantibiotics are antimicrobial peptides that have been the focus of much attention in recent years with a view to clinical, veterinary, and food applications. Although many lantibiotics are produced by food-grade bacteria or bacteria generally regarded as safe, some lantibiotics are produced by pathogens and, rather than contributing to food safety and/or health, add to the virulence potential of the producing strains. Indeed, genome sequencing has revealed the presence of genes apparently encoding a lantibiotic, designated Bsa (bacteriocin of Staphylococcus aureus), among clinical isolates of S. aureus and those associated with community-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) infections in particular. Here, we establish for the first time, through a combination of reverse genetics, mass spectrometry, and mutagenesis, that these genes encode a functional lantibiotic. We also reveal that Bsa is identical to the previously identified bacteriocin staphylococcin Au-26, produced by an S. aureus strain of vaginal origin. Our examination of MRSA isolates that produce the Panton-Valentine leukocidin demonstrates that many community-acquired S. aureus strains, and representatives of ST8 and ST80 in particular, are producers of Bsa. While possession of Bsa immunity genes does not significantly enhance resistance to the related lantibiotic gallidermin, the broad antimicrobial spectrum of Bsa strongly indicates that production of this bacteriocin confers a competitive ecological advantage on community-acquired S. aureus. doi:10.1128/JB.01375-09

Unlike the colicins, microcins and related peptide antibiotics, little is known about antibiotic proteins ([M.sub.r]> 10 000) from Gram-positive bacteria, since only few examples have been described to date. In this study we used heterologous expression of recombinant proteins to access the 17 kDa antibiotic protein SA-M57 from Streptococcus pyogenes, along with two proteins of unknown function identified in publicly available databases: EF1097 from Enterococcus faecalis and YpkK from Corynebacterium jeikeium. Here we show that all three are antibiotic proteins with different spectra of antimicrobial activity that kill sensitive bacteria at nanomolar concentrations. In silico structure predictions indicate that although the three proteins share little sequence similarity, they may be composed of conserved secondary structural elements: a relatively unstructured, acidic N-terminal portion and a basic C-terminal portion characterized by two helical elements separated by a loop structure and stabilized by an essential disulphide. Expression of individual segments as well as protein chimaeras revealed that, at least in the case of YpkK, the C-terminal portion is responsible for the killing action of the protein, whereas the role of the N-terminal portion remains unclear. Both scnM57 and ef1097 appear to be widely distributed in Strep. pyogenes and Ent. faecalis (respectively), whereas ypkK is found only rarely amongst clinical isolates of C. jeikeium. Finally, we determined that the proteins kill sensitive bacteria without lysis, a feature that distinguishes them from known murolytic proteins.

Streptococcus uberis is commonly found in the environment and in association with various bovine body sites and is a major cause of bovine mastitis. Moreover, S. uberis is known to produce a variety of bacteriocin-like inhibitory substances, antimicrobial agents that generally inhibit closely related bacterial species. In this respect, S. uberis strain 42 has previously been shown to produce a novel nisin variant named nisin U. This paper reports that, in addition to nisin U, S. uberis strain 42 produces a second bacteriocin that induces the lysis of metabolically active, susceptible target bacteria and which has therefore been named uberolysin. Isolation of the native active antimicrobial agent revealed that uberolysin is a 7048 Da peptide that is refractory to sequence analysis by Edman degradation. Transposon mutagenesis was used to generate a uberolysin-negative mutant of S. uberis 42 and sequencing of DNA flanking the insertion site revealed, in addition to the structural gene (ublA), several open reading frames likely to be involved in post-translational modification, transport and producer self-protection (immunity), and possibly in regulation of the biosynthetic gene cluster. In addition, a pair of direct repeats that may be involved in bacteriocin acquisition were identified; indeed, ublA could be identified in 18% of tested S. uberis strains. Enzymic hydrolysis of uberolysin was used to confirm that ublA does indeed encode the precursor of uberolysin, that an unusually short leader sequence of only six amino acids is cleaved during processing of the mature peptide and that uberolysin is post-translationally covalently modified to form a head-to-tail monocycle. Thus, uberolysin is a unique cyclic bacteriocin, belonging to the same family of bacteriocins as enterocin AS-48 and circularin A. DOI 10.1099/mic.0.2006/005967-0