Distributed Learning System Design: A New Approach and an Agenda for Future Research

This article presents a theoretical framework designed to guide distributed learning design, with the goal of enhancing the effectiveness of distributed learning systems. The authors begin with a review of the extant research on distributed learning design, and themes embedded in this literature are extracted and discussed to identify critical gaps that should be addressed by future work in this area. A conceptual framework that integrates instructional objectives, targeted competencies, instructional design considerations, and technological features is then developed to address the most pressing gaps in current research and practice. The rationale and logic underlying this framework is explicated. The framework is designed to help guide trainers and instructional designers through critical stages of the distributed learning system design process. In addition, it is intended to help researchers identify critical issues that should serve as the focus of future research efforts. Recommendations and future research directions are presented and discussed

Reputation and Competence in Publicly Funded Science: Estimating the Effects on Research Group Productivity..

This paper estimates the "production function" for scientific research publications in the field of biotechnology. It utilizes an exceptionally rich and comprehensive data set pertaining to the universe of research groups that applied to a 1989-1993 research program in biotechnology and bio-instrumentation, sponsored by the Italian National research Council, CNR. A structural model of the resource allocation process in scientific research guides the selection of instruments in the econometric analysis, and controls for selectivity bias effects on estimates based on the performance of funded research units. The average elasticity of research output with respect to the research budget is estimated to be 0.6; but, for a small fraction of groups led by highly prestigious PIs this elasticity approaches 1. These estimates imply, conditional on the distribution of observed productivity, that a more unequal distribution of research funds would increase research output in the short-run. Past research publication performance is found to have an important effect on expect levels of grant funding, and hence on the unit's current productivity in terms of (quality adjusted) publications. The results show that the productivity of aggregate resource expenditures supporting scientific research is critically dependent on the institutional mechanisms and criteria employed in the allocation of such resources.

“It Takes All Kinds”: A Simulation Modeling Perspective on Motivation and Coordination in Libre Software Development Projects

This paper presents a stochastic simulation model to study implications of the mechanisms by which individual software developers’ efforts are allocated within large and complex open source software projects. It illuminates the role of different forms of “motivations-at-the-margin” in the micro-level resource allocation process of distributed and decentralized multi-agent engineering undertakings of this kind. We parameterize the model by isolating the parameter ranges in which it generates structures of code that share certain empirical regularities found to characterize actual projects. We find that, in this range, a variety of different motivations are represented within the community of developers. There is a correspondence between the indicated mixture of motivations and the distribution of avowed motivations for engaging in FLOSS development, found in the survey responses of developers who were participants in large projects.free and open source software (FLOSS), libre software engineering, maintainability, reliability, functional diversity, modularity, developers’ motivations, user-innovation, peer-esteem, reputational reward systems, agent-based modeling, stochastic simulation, stigmergy, morphogenesis.

Qualitative Case Studies in Operations Management: Trends, Research Outcomes, And Future Research Implications

Our study examines the state of qualitative case studies in operations management. Five main operations management journals are included for their impact on the field. They are in alphabetical order: Decision Sciences, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, and Production and Operations Management. The qualitative case studies chosen were published between 1992 and 2007. With an increasing trend toward using more qualitative case studies, there have been meaningful and significant contributions to the field of operations management, especially in the area of theory building. However, in many of the qualitative case studies we reviewed, sufficient details in research design, data collection, and data analysis were missing. For instance, there are studies that do not offer sampling logic or a description of the analysis through which research out-comes are drawn. Further, research protocols for doing inductive case studies are much better developed compared to the research protocols for doing deductive case studies. Consequently, there is a lack of consistency in the way the case method has been applied. As qualitative researchers, we offer suggestions on how we can improve on what we have done and elevate the level of rigor and consistency

Are Groups more Rational than Individuals? A Review of Interactive Decision Making in Groups

Many decisions are interactive; the outcome of one party depends not only on its decisions or on acts of nature but also on the decisions of others. In the present article, we review the literature on decision making made by groups of the past 25 years. Researchers have compared the strategic behavior of groups and individuals in many games: prisoner’s dilemma, dictator, ultimatum, trust, centipede and principal-agent games, among others. Our review suggests that results are quite consistent in revealing that groups behave closer to the game-theoretical assumption of rationality and selfishness than individuals. We conclude by discussing future research avenues in this area.group decision making, interactive decision making, rationality, discontinuity effect

Issues in Managerial Compensation Research

[Excerpt] Compensation is at the core of any employment exchange (Milkovich & Newman, 1993; Simon, 1951). It is probably the most basic reason people agree to become employees and it serves as a defining characteristic of any employment relationship (March & Simon, 1958). Recently, managers have been bombarded with a profusion of ways to pay employees. There is team-based pay, broad-banding, pay at risk, paying for competencies, paying for skills, and even The New pay. Understanding which of these have the potential to add value and which are relatively more effective is a tough task, like untying the Gordian knot. Rather than simply cutting through the problem (Alexander the Great\u27s tack), managers often seek guidance from research. Yet, researchers have also been bombarded - not just with new practices, but also with new theories. Included in this theoretic barrage is agency theory, tournament models, contingency theory, institutional theory, procedural justice, political influence theory, organizational demography, resource dependency, psychological contracts, and the resource-based view of the firm. The list seems almost endless. If Lord Keynes is correct that theories drive practical peoples\u27 decisions, understanding which of these theories is useful and which is not is important for both compensation researchers and practical decision makers

The prosocial roots of children's developing morality

According to many scholars, prosociality, in particular altruism and empathic concern, is considered an important motivational factor both in adulthood and in the development of morality (Batson & Shaw, 1991; Jensen et al., 2014; Nichols, 2004; Roughley & Bayertz, 2019). So far, a large number of studies have addressed the development of children’s first-party prosociality and their third-party understanding of moral norms separately. In particular, there is much evidence that during the second year of life, young children develop empathic concern and sympathy for others in need in prosocial situations (Hepach, 2017; Hepach et al., 2012). Moreover, recent findings suggest that 18-month-old infants already show some rudimentary forms of norm understanding in at least dyadic conventional situations. This rudimentary norm understanding is interpreted as second-personal normative expectations (Schmidt et al., 2019). Finally, 3-year-old children not only have descriptive expectations about morality, but also normative ones as suggested by their enforcement of moral norms as unaffected bystanders (Rakoczy et al., 2016; Rossano et al., 2011; Vaish et al., 2011). However, the interrelation between prosociality and morality, in particular the prosocial motivational source of the early sense of morality remains unclear. This thesis aimed to investigate the developmental origins of morality in young children. In particular, it examines the relation between the two main aspects of uniquely human cooperation – prosociality and morality – from a developmental perspective. These two aspects are of particular importance, not only because they each play a key role in maintaining the unique human capacity for large-scale cooperation (Tomasello, 2016, 2018) but also because of their close relation to each other (Batson, 2010; Batson & Shaw, 1991; Nichols, 2004). The present thesis therefore focused on three guiding questions that are essential for the ontogeny of morality and its relation to young children’s prosocial (altruistic) motivation to understand, adhere to, and enforce moral norms: (1) What are the developmental origins of morality? (2) What is the underlying prosocial motivation for children's normative appreciation of morality? (3) What is the scope of morality? Study 1 investigated the developmental origins of morality in 18-month-old infants. A novel eye-tracking paradigm (anticipatory looking, pupil dilation) was used to examine whether infants differentiate between prototypical moral (harmful) and conventional (harmless) violations. In a between-subjects-design, children watched the same video clip whose audio stream differed according to condition. In the first two (conventional) conditions, an instructor told an observer to destroy a picture with a particular tool chosen from two available tools (tool A: conventional violation condition; tool B: no violation condition). In the moral violation condition, the instructor forbade the observer to destroy the picture at all. In all three conditions, the observer then grasped tool B and destroyed the picture, which led to three different (violation) situations. Infants differentiated between two types of conventional norm situations in their anticipatory looking. Moreover, they showed a larger relative increase in pupil dilation in response to a moral violation than to a conventional violation. These findings suggest that 18-month-old infants have third-party descriptive expectations about the distinction between conventional and moral violation situations. Moreover, they provide the first evidence that empathic concern may be a decisive capacity for the distinction between these two violation situations. Study set 2 looked at the underlying prosocial motivation for the appreciation of morality as a normative notion in 3-year-old children. In three experiments, children were given a third-party fairness task (which varied across experiments) and two different prosocial tasks. To investigate whether the children have a proper norm understanding of fairness by looking not only at norm adherence, but also at norm enforcement, a spontaneous protest paradigm was used. In Experiment 1, children protested and corrected unequal (but not equal) allocations, suggesting a normative understanding of third-party fairness. Experiment 2 assessed whether children’s normative expectations about fairness have a moral (authority-independent) dimension. To do so, children observed a distributor who followed (unequal condition) or violated (equal condition) an authority’s command to allocate resources unequally. Again, despite the authority’s dictate to act unequally, children protested more against unequal versus equal allocations. In Experiment 3, results show that children enforced fairness norms by altruistic punishment in the sense of restorative justice. While in Experiment 1 and 2 I found a positive relation of protest behavior and emotional sharing (empathic concern), in Experiment 3 children’s altruistic punishment was associated with their own costly sharing behavior (altruism). Finally, in Study 3, I explored the scope of morality (looking at equal treatment) in 5-to 6-year-old children in a typical intergroup context. Here, I investigated whether decategorization – a candidate mechanism to overcome in-group bias by emphasizing the individual person – would lead preschoolers to treat in-group and out-group members equally when sharing resources in a dictator game. I found that preschoolers shared more resources with an in-group than with an out-group recipient when social category membership was emphasized. When individuating information was emphasized (decategorization), however, children shared the same with in-group and out-group individuals. Taken together, the empirical studies of this dissertation provide a novel overview of the prosocial roots of children's developing morality. In particular, the present findings suggest that (1) the ability to feel sympathy may be critical for the development of the moral-conventional distinction and that 18-month-old infants, at minimum, have third-party descriptive expectations about that distinction. (2) The ontogeny of fairness norms can be characterized as moral in that it is associated with 3-year-old children’s developing concern for the welfare of others in different contexts. (3) The presentation of out-group members as individuals may be a powerful tool to reduce in-group bias and to foster equal treatment (an important moral category) of in-group and out-group members in 5- to 6-year-old preschool children

Priority setting: what constitutes success? A conceptual framework for successful priority setting

BACKGROUND: The sustainability of healthcare systems worldwide is threatened by a growing demand for services and expensive innovative technologies. Decision makers struggle in this environment to set priorities appropriately, particularly because they lack consensus about which values should guide their decisions. One way to approach this problem is to determine what all relevant stakeholders understand successful priority setting to mean. The goal of this research was to develop a conceptual framework for successful priority setting. METHODS: Three separate empirical studies were completed using qualitative data collection methods (one-on-one interviews with healthcare decision makers from across Canada; focus groups with representation of patients, caregivers and policy makers; and Delphi study including scholars and decision makers from five countries). RESULTS: This paper synthesizes the findings from three studies into a framework of ten separate but interconnected elements germane to successful priority setting: stakeholder understanding, shifted priorities/reallocation of resources, decision making quality, stakeholder acceptance and satisfaction, positive externalities, stakeholder engagement, use of explicit process, information management, consideration of values and context, and revision or appeals mechanism. CONCLUSION: The ten elements specify both quantitative and qualitative dimensions of priority setting and relate to both process and outcome components. To our knowledge, this is the first framework that describes successful priority setting. The ten elements identified in this research provide guidance for decision makers and a common language to discuss priority setting success and work toward improving priority setting efforts

The roots of moral autonomy

Human cooperation and group living are based on societies in which individuals not only care about their own interests but share common norms and values – such as morality and prosocial behavior. As early as the 18th century, Immanuel Kant postulated autonomy as the key to human morality. Kant explained that a rational agent with a free will would necessarily make moral – not immoral – decisions. However, the fundamental question of how moral behavior acquires normative weight remains unresolved until the present day, especially when moral behavior entails personal costs for the individual. This dissertation builds on Kant’s thesis and aims to investigate important building blocks of moral autonomy at preschool age. Therefore, children’s own prosocial decisions as well as their normative and descriptive expectations about others’ prosocial actions are assessed and linked to fundamental underlying mechanisms such as cultural learning and collective intentionality. Study 1 assessed whether preschoolers enforce agreed-upon prosocial ver-sus selfish sharing norms in a group dictator game. Three- and 5-year-old children and two hand puppets had the opportunity to agree on how to distribute re-sources between themselves and a group of passive recipients. The findings sug-gest that preschoolers understand prosocial, but not selfish, agreements as binding even though prosocial sharing norms are associated with personal costs. Study Set 2 assessed in two experiments whether observed choice increases the children’s own prosocial sharing behavior. In Experiment 1, children observed an adult model who was provided with costly choice (i.e., sharing instead of keeping an item), (b) non-costly choice (i.e., sharing instead of watching an item be thrown away), or (c) no choice (i.e., being instructed to share an item). As a next step, children were given the opportunity to decide how many stickers (out of three) they would like to share with a sad animal puppet. Experiment 2 aimed to investigate possible age effects. The study design was reduced to condition (a) and (c), a second test trial was added. Taken together, the results of Study Set 2 suggest that 5-year-old’s (but not 4-year old’s) prosocial sharing behavior increases when previously having observed someone who intentionally acts prosocially at a personal cost. Study 3 investigated preschoolers’ descriptive expectations about the causal agent of prosocial and selfish actions, based on agents’ prior history of voluntary versus involuntary prosocial behavior. The results show that children at the age of 5.5 years use information about the circumstances and intentions of previous actions to generate descriptive expectations about other’s future prosocial behavior. From 4 years of age, children distinguish between an agent who shares voluntarily and an agent who shares only involuntarily. Taken together, this dissertation shows that preschool aged children infer and enforce prosocial – but not selfish – sharing norms. They engage in prosocial sharing which is affected by observed choice and they form descriptive expectations about others tendency to behave prosocial or selfish on the base of knowledge about the agents prosocial versus selfish intentions

Assessment of the Major Factors Affecting Budget Preparation and Implementation in Ethiopian Public Universities (The Case of Mettu, Jimma and Wollega Universities)

This study was conducted on the Assessment of the Major Factors Affecting Budget Preparation and Implementation in Ethiopian Public Universities (The Case of Mettu, Jimma and Wollega universities). In order to achieve the objectives of the study, both questionnaire and interview was employed to collect primary data. The method used for sampling of respondents was simple random sampling.  Accordingly, sample sizes of 100 out of 135 total numbers of respondents have been included in the study. The collected data was analysed using SPSS. The findings show that lack of Information Communication Technology; lack of transparency and accountability of budget utilization and corruption are the major factors affecting budget preparation and implementation in ethiopian public universities (the case of mettu, jimma and wollega universities). Based on these findings the researchers suggest that training should be given for employees and technology should be employed to manage the budgetary process and implementation