Steering Capital: Optimizing Financial Support for Innovation in Public Education

Examines efforts to align capital to education innovation and calls for clarity and agreement on problems, goals, and metrics; an effective R&D system; an evidence-based culture of continuous improvement; and transparent, comparable, and useful data

User motivational mechanism for building sustained online communities

The proliferation of online communities on the Internet nowadays may lead people to the conclusion that the development of custom-made communities for particular purpose is straightforward. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Although software providing basic community infrastructure is readily available, it is not enough to ensure that the online community will “take off” and become sustained. Most online communities suffer from the scarcity of the user participation in their initial phase. To address the problem, this thesis proposes a motivational mechanism to encourage user participation. The main idea is to introduce a set of hierarchical memberships into online communities and reward active users with better quality of services. The mechanism has been applied in a small-scale online community called Comtella and evaluated. The results showed that, although the mechanism was able to motivate users to participate more actively and make more contributions, it led to a deteriorating quality of user contributions, catalyzed “information overload” in the community and resulted in a decrease in user participation towards the end of the study. Therefore, to regulate the quality and the quantity of user contributions and ensure a sustainable level of user participation in the online community, the proposed mechanism was improved so that it was able to adapt the rewards for particular forms of participation for individual users depending on their reputation and the current need of the community, thereby influencing their actions of contributing. The improved mechanism was also implemented and evaluated in the Comtella system. The results of evaluation showed that the mechanism can guarantee stable and active user participation and lower the level of information overload in the online community and therefore it can enhance the sustainability of the community

Collaborative information finding in smaller communities: The case of research talks

Social navigation and social tagging technologies enable user communities to assemble the collective wisdom, and use it to help community members in finding the right information. However, it takes a significantly-sized community to make a social system truly useful. The question addressed in this paper is whether collaborative information finding is feasible in the context of smaller communities. To answer this question, we developed two social systems specifically focused on smaller communities - CoMeT and Conference Navigator II - and explored several techniques to increase the volume of user contributions. This paper reviews the explored techniques and presents empirical evidence that demonstrate their effectiveness. © 2010 ICST

Use multiple modeling approaches to study sustained online communities

In recent years, extensive studies of many interesting aspects of online community dynamics promoted a better understanding of this area. One of the most challenging problems facing builders of online communities is the design of incentive mechanisms that can ensure user participation. However, running online community experiments in the real world is expensive, and requires a great deal of motivation from users. In this thesis two major approaches are explored: system dynamics modeling and agent-based modeling, to simulate the overall behaviours of participants in online communities. Although these models are developed by using two different methodologies, both of them can provide insights into the user motivation process, incentive mechanism evaluation and community development. The target online community for my study is called Comtella, which is used in several senior Computer Science classes in the Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan. Simulation models for the Comtella online community have been developed and the simulation results are useful to provide future directions for incentive mechanism improvement

Sustaining Participant Involvement in Crowdsourcing Contests through Collaboration

With the advances in internet technologies and the emergence of crowdsourcing, organizations are now increasingly looking outside their boundaries for solving problems. Yet, the success of crowdsourcing processes depends on the sustained participation of crowdsourcing individuals. Previous studies have mainly focused on understanding individuals’ initial motivation for participation with few focusing on the factors that affect individuals’ sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. None of these studies examined how collaboration affects individuals’ participation behavior in crowdsourcing contests. This study attempts to understand how individuals’ collaboration (in the form of comments and votes) affects their sustained participation in online problem solving contests. This study uses data from the Kaggle website that holds online data science competitions in which individuals submit their proposed solutions with the best solutions being rewarded. Our results show that individuals who receive more attention from other members tend to come back and maintain their participation in the platform

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

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

Enhance User Engagement using Gamified Ineternet of Things

Gamification is considered as a promising approach to enhance people’s engagement in many social or technical systems, thus is supposed to play an important role in future Internet of Everything (IoE). Although gamification elements have already been reported in various IoT research, there still lacks answers about how gamification may affect user engagement in IoT systems and through what paths. In present work, we are synthesizing and analyzing existing research efforts in these emerging fields to provide implications for future IoE development. The results are categorized into three dimensions by considering cognitive-behavioral outcome, procedural stage and population scale