Scaling Success: Lessons from Adaptation Pilots in the Rainfed Regions of India

"Scaling Success" examines how agricultural communities are adapting to the challenges posed by climate change through the lens of India's rainfed agriculture regions. Rainfed agriculture currently occupies 58 percent of India's cultivated land and accounts for up to 40 percent of its total food production. However, these regions face potential production losses of more than $200 billion USD in rice, wheat, and maize by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Unless action is taken soon at a large scale, farmers will see sharp decreases in revenue and yields.Rainfed regions across the globe have been an important focus for the first generation of adaptation projects, but to date, few have achieved a scale that can be truly transformational. Drawing on lessons learnt from 21 case studies of rainfed agriculture interventions, the report provides guidance on how to design, fund and support adaptation projects that can achieve scale

Education Workforce Initiative: Initial Research

The purpose of this initial research is to offer evidenced possibilities in the key areas of education workforce roles, recruitment, training, deployment and leadership, along with suggested areas for further research to inform innovation in the design and strengthening of the public sector education workforce. The examples described were identified through the process outlined in the methodology section of this report, whilst we recognise that separation of examples from their context is problematic – effective innovations are highly sensitive to context and uncritical transfer of initiatives is rarely successful. The research aims to support the Education Workforce Initiative (EWI) in moving forward with engaging education leaders and other key actors in radical thinking around the design and strengthening of the education workforce to meet the demands of the 21st century. EWI policy recommendations will be drawn from a number of country level workforce reform activities and research activity associated with the production of an Education Workforce Report (EWR). This research has informed the key questions, approach and structure of the EWR as outlined in the Education Workforce Report Proposal. Issues pertaining to teaching and learning in primary and secondary education are at the centre of the research reported here; the focus is on moving towards schools as safe places where all children/ young people are able to engage in meaningful activity. The majority of the evidence shared here relates to teachers and school leaders; evidence on learning support staff, district officials and the wider education workforce is scant. Many of the issues examined are also pertinent to the early childhood care and education sector but these are being examined in depth by the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative. Resourcing for the Education Workforce was out of scope of this initial research but the EC recognises, as outlined in the Learning Generation Report, that provision of additional finance is a critical factor in achieving a sustainable, strong and well-motivated education workforce, particularly but not exclusively, in low and middle income countries. The next stage of EWI work will consider the relative costs of current initiatives and modelling of the cost implications of proposed reforms. EWI aims to complement the work on teacher policy design and teacher career frameworks (including salary structures) being undertaken by other bodies and institutions such as Education International, the International Task Force on Teachers for 2030 and the Teachers’ Alliance, most particularly by bringing a focus on school and district leadership, the role of Education Support Professionals (ESPs) and inter-agency working

Models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis

Digital technology has become near ubiquitous in many countries today or is on a path to reach this state in the near future. Across the globe the share of internet users, for instance, has jumped in the last ten years. In Europe most countries have a share of internet users near to or above 90% in 2016 (last year available for international comparisons), in China the current share is 53%, but this has grown from just 16% in 2007, even in Ethiopia the share has grown from 0.4% to 15.4% in the same period (data from ITU). At the same time expectations of widespread adoption of digital solutions in higher education have been rising. In 2017 the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report predicted that adaptive learning would take less than a year to be widely adopted (Adams Becker et al., 2017). And projects such as ‘Virtually Inspired’ are showcasing creative examples of how new technologies are already being harnessed to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Furthermore, discussion of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals emphasise the key potentials that digital technology holds for achieving the goals for education in 2030 (UNESCO, 2017). These developments lead university and college leadership to the question of how they should position their institution. What type of digitalisation initiatives can be found practice beyond best practices and future potentials? This is the question that this study attempts to answer. It sets out to analyse how higher education providers from across the world are harnessing digitalisation to improve teaching and learning and learner support and to identify emerging types of practice. For this, it focuses on the dimensions of flexibility of provision (in terms of time, place and pace) and openness of provision (in terms of who has access to learning and support and who is involved in the design of learning provision), as both of these dimensions can significantly benefit from integration of digital solutions. The method of information collation used by the study was a global survey of higher education institutions (HEIs) covering all world continents, more than thirty countries and 69 cases. The survey found that nearly three-quarters of all HEIs have at least one strategic focus and typologies were developed based on this analysis to group HEIs with similar strategic focuses. Overall, the findings suggest that most higher education providers are just at the beginning of developing comprehensive strategies for harnessing digitalisation. For this reason, the authors of this study believe that providers can benefit from the outcomes of this study’s research, as it can be used by university and college leadership for benchmarking similarities and differences and for cooperative peer learning between institutions. The database of cases and the guidelines for reviewing current strategies, which accompany this study, aim to facilitate this learning and evaluation process

An adaptive distributed Intrusion detection system architecture using multi agents

Intrusion detection systems are used for monitoring the network data, analyze them and find the intrusions if any. The major issues with these systems are the time taken for analysis, transfer of bulk data from one part of the network to another, high false positives and adaptability to the future threats. These issues are addressed here by devising a framework for intrusion detection. Here, various types of co-operating agents are distributed in the network for monitoring, analyzing, detecting and reporting. Analysis and detection agents are the mobile agents which are the primary detection modules for detecting intrusions. Their mobility eliminates the transfer of bulk data for processing. An algorithm named territory is proposed to avoid interference of one analysis agent with another one. A communication layout of the analysis and detection module with other modules is depicted. The inter-agent communication reduces the false positives significantly. It also facilitates the identification of distributed types of attacks. The co-ordinator agents log various events and summarize the activities in its network. It also communicates with co-ordinator agents of other networks. The system is highly scalable by increasing the number of various agents if needed. Centralized processing is avoided here to evade single point of failure. We created a prototype and the experiments done gave very promising results showing the effectiveness of the system

Advancing climate change health adaptation through implementation science

To date, there are few examples of implementation science studies that help guide climate-related health adaptation. Implementation science is the study of methods to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based tools, interventions, and policies into practice to improve population health. These studies can provide the needed empirical evidence to prioritise and inform implementation of health adaptation efforts. This Personal View discusses five case studies that deployed disease early warning systems around the world. These cases studies illustrate challenges to deploying early warning systems and guide recommendations for implementation science approaches to enhance future research. We propose theory-informed approaches to understand multilevel barriers, design strategies to overcome those barriers, and analyse the ability of those strategies to advance the uptake and scale-up of climate-related health interventions. These findings build upon previous theoretical work by grounding implementation science recommendations and guidance in the context of real-world practice, as detailed in the case studies.Peer ReviewedArticle signat per 14 autors/es: Gila Neta, PhD; William Pan, DrPH; Prof Kristie Ebi, PhD; Daniel F Buss, PhD; Trisha Castranio, BS; Prof Rachel Lowe, PhD; Sadie J Ryan, PhD; Anna M Stewart-Ibarra, PhD; Limb K Hapairai, PhD; Meena Sehgal, MPH; Prof Michael C Wimberly, PhD; Leslie Rollock, DrPH; Prof Maureen Lichtveld, MD; John Balbus, MD"Postprint (published version