Transforming students through peer assessment and authentic practice

This briefing document reports on a seminar where participants were provided with the opportunity to consider how they can provide authentic assessment and involve students as peers and mentors in the assessment process within their own discipline areas. The session explored the potential benefits of these approaches and also addressed the fears and possible drawbacks of such approaches, creating the opportunity to explore these in more detail and discuss solutions and approaches to avoid. The workshop was built around three different experiences of assessment practice in the higher education sector. It used a combination of speed geeking and a world cafe to allow participants to move around the room and listen to a short presentation on each experience and contribute to a related question in a conversational manner. The first experience was based on the use of students to provide feedback to their peers on formative work. The second experience used students from one subject area to help ‘mentor’ students in a different subject area. The final experience used a conference with external delegates to provide an authentic assessment experience for students

Community-Based Approaches to Health: How Engaging Local Community Members Can Transform the Health of Hard-to-Reach Populations

From rural villages in Malawi to crowded urban slums in Bangladesh, community-based health organizations are delivering interventions to underserved communities around the world. Though they may work in different parts of the world, the most successful organizations share the same core approaches: building turst with local leaders and gradually dismantling the geographic, economic, cultural, and behavioral barriers to health delivery. Explore evidence-based solutions and nonprofit models that are working around the world in Community-Based Approaches to Health: How Engaging Local Community Members Can Transform the Health of Hard-to-Reach Population

Regional tourist destinations - the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in collaboration amongst tourism providers

The tourism industry can be seen as one of the first business sectors where business functions are almost exclusively using information and communications technologies (ICT). This has impacted on the way in which regional tourism destinations are promoted. The method of promoting regions via the development of regional tourist destination websites or portals using Internet technologies is increasingly being adopted both in Australia and around the world. This paper investigates whether this approach is the most effective to achieve increased awareness and subsequent visitation of a region. Are there other ways to achieve a similar outcome? One such alternative is via a bottom up approach achieved through co-opetition or collaboration established within the group of local tourism industry operators. This cooperative networking is made possible via the use of ICT to facilitate the establishment of virtual business networks amongst tourism operators in a local community, cascading into an informal secondary tourism network within that region. In many Australian regional areas the tourism bureau has been the key node for local tourism, but this structure has been fraught with many problems. Little is known about their effectiveness in delivering services to local small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs). The role of tourism bureaus in local tourism networks is changing and a study of this dynamic is provided here as an example of the interaction between top down and bottom up approaches. Published case studies from around the world are considered demonstrating alternative approaches to using ICT to promote a region and communicate with potential visitors. Future empirical research is required to more fully understand the effectiveness of the different approaches

“Dust in the wind...”, deep learning application to wind energy time series forecasting

To balance electricity production and demand, it is required to use different prediction techniques extensively. Renewable energy, due to its intermittency, increases the complexity and uncertainty of forecasting, and the resulting accuracy impacts all the different players acting around the electricity systems around the world like generators, distributors, retailers, or consumers. Wind forecasting can be done under two major approaches, using meteorological numerical prediction models or based on pure time series input. Deep learning is appearing as a new method that can be used for wind energy prediction. This work develops several deep learning architectures and shows their performance when applied to wind time series. The models have been tested with the most extensive wind dataset available, the National Renewable Laboratory Wind Toolkit, a dataset with 126,692 wind points in North America. The architectures designed are based on different approaches, Multi-Layer Perceptron Networks (MLP), Convolutional Networks (CNN), and Recurrent Networks (RNN). These deep learning architectures have been tested to obtain predictions in a 12-h ahead horizon, and the accuracy is measured with the coefficient of determination, the R² method. The application of the models to wind sites evenly distributed in the North America geography allows us to infer several conclusions on the relationships between methods, terrain, and forecasting complexity. The results show differences between the models and confirm the superior capabilities on the use of deep learning techniques for wind speed forecasting from wind time series data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The effectiveness of banking supervision

Banking supervision is an essential aspect of modern financial systems, seeking crucially to monitor risk-taking by banks so as to protect depositors, the government safety net and the economy as a whole against systemic bank failure and its consequences. In this context, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between risk indicators for individual banks and the different approaches to banking supervision adopted around the world. This is the first work to make use of the currently available cross section series data on bank supervision from the World Bank to carry out empirical investigations in a panel data framework, gaining all the advantages in increased efficiency and information that comes from estimations combining longer time series and a wide range of countries. We find wide-ranging effects of design features of banking supervision on risk taking which raise important policy issues

Hilltops and Marches: A Cultural and Semiotic Analysis of Pepsi and Coca-Cola Advertising Strategies

The Coca-Cola Company released an advertisement in 1971 that had powerful themes of unity in a time of significant discord around the world. Almost 50 years later, the Pepsi Company released an advertisement that aimed to accomplish similar values of unity and commonality when the world seemed at odds with itself. While both advertisements sought to convey similar messages, the reception could not have been more different. Coca-Cola has experienced continued praise for their famous “Hilltop” advertisement while Pepsi was forced to take their advertisement down within 24 hours of its release. This paper utilizes semiotic theory to analyze the signs in the advertisements to create an understanding of how each advertisement was perceived differently. In order to understand a semiotic approach, this paper also approaches semiotics with respect to the historical contexts surrounding both advertisements

Towards comprehensive training

Training programs are the most common active labor market interventions around the world. Whether designed to develop skills of young job seekers or upgrading skills of adult workers, training programs are aimed at counteracting employability barriers that hinder the integration of people into the labor markets. Training approaches vary greatly across countries and regions. Some have a focus on classroom lectures while others emphasize training in the workplace. Based on a dataset of studies of training programs from 90 countries around the world, this paper examines the incidence of different training types over time and their impact on labor market outcomes of trainees. The authors find a general pattern of transition from in-classroom training to comprehensive measures that combine classroom and workplace training with supplementary services. Moreover, this transition has paid off. Comprehensive training interventions tend to increase the probability of having positive labor market outcomes for trainees, as compared to in-classroom training only.Primary Education,Labor Markets,Education For All,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Labor Policies

Early childhood transitions research: A review of concepts, theory, and practice’ Working Paper 48

Chapter 1 begins by outlining developmental concepts which underpin transition themes, in particular those associated with the theories of Jean Piaget and other ‘stage’ theorists. Their ideas are highlighted early on because so much transitions research builds on or reacts to core developmental assumptions. Chapter 1 then introduces socio-cultural perspectives on early childhood transitions. These are distinguished by their focus on how children learn by interacting with their immediate socio-cultural environments (e.g., caregivers, peers). This emphasis has been elaborated by several disciplines within the social sciences and is increasingly mirrored in early child development programmes around the world. Chapter 2 examines the different ways in which transitions are structured, drawing attention to varying logics that can be employed to mark transitions in early childhood. Institutional settings often use biological age as the criterion for readiness. By contrast, sociocultural transitions are often marked through rites of passage, following the cultural and economic reasoning of a given community. Also, around the world children engage in horizontal transitions as they move between different domains of everyday life. Chapter 3 shifts to perspectives on transitions that are informed by systems theories. These are distinguished from socio-cultural approaches by their greater emphasis on the links between individuals, macro social processes and historical changes. These approaches highlight the linkages between children, their communities and global societies and draw attention to the importance of comprehensive programmes that enable children to engage critically with the demands of a changing environment. Chapter 4 focuses on children’s active roles in shaping their transition experiences, with particular attention to the significance of peer group relationships as a moderating influence on transitions. The section then explores research methods that may enable the implementation of children’s right to participation within research and programming in this area. The final chapter discusses the findings of this review, highlighting significant research strengths and gaps of the various approaches presented, followed by a glossary of key transitions concepts discussed in the paper

Cultures of Image Construction Approaching Planning Cultures as a Factor in Urban Image Production

Why do the same planning approaches cause different results around the world? Because, even in times of globalization, there is obviously more than one way of planning. These different modes are an expression of distinct local planning cultures. Hence, we need to take a closer look at the influence of planning cultures on outcomes of urban development processes. This paper joins debates on the nature of planning culture with culture-led image production as one specific process of urban development, and asks to what degree a local planning culture might influence the production of cultural image. The paper provides a first step in building an analytical framework for analyzing image production and its interplay with local planning cultures, and gives hints on critical points in the so-called ‘cultures of image construction’