Using ODL and ICT to develop the skills of the unreached: a contribution to the ADEA triennial of the Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning

Innovation in technology is occurring at rapid pace thus shrinking the distances and making information and knowledge more than ever accessible to everyone irrespective of where the person resides. This paper consists of four main articles. The first one deals with technological trends. The second one focuses on the deployment and use of open and distance education mode in rural areas by documenting initiatives that embrace information and communication technologies (ICTs). Due to challenges faced in rural areas only a few success stories/cases currently exist and some of these are cited in this article. The challenges faced in the deployment of ICT enhanced ODL have been highlighted as well as the potential of developing and delivering effective and relevant ODL programmes in rural areas in order to ensure that issues of educational equity and social exclusion rural communities are adequately addressed. ICTs in ODL are perhaps the greatest tool to date for self-education and value addition to any community’s development efforts, yet poor rural communities particularly in Africa do not have the necessary awareness, skills or facilities to enable themselves to develop using ICTs. Inadequate ICT infrastructures in rural areas remain a major source for the digital divide in Africa and for under-performance of distance learners. The third one analyses the support provided to ODL learners who often encounter difficulties in completing their studies through the distance education mode due to loneliness, uncertainties and de-motivation. ICT has not been able to sufficiently support distance learners in overcoming those obstacles efficiently. An investigation regarding those learning supports has been conducted in ten distance learning institutions, along with an intensive literature review with the aim of understanding the high percentage of dropout rates of distant learners. The learners’ interactions have been scrutinized through content analysis of their synchronous exchanges, during a completely online course. After taking into account the limited technical and human resources in Africa, a technological virtual environment along with a pedagogical framework has been proposed with the aim of giving adequate educational support to them. The fourth article has explored The Open University (UK) and its efforts to use new technologies to deliver online courses to difficult-to- reach learners in prison environments. The case study analysed here is an international course (called, B201- Business Organisations and their environments) which also touches an African cohort of learners. The implications for designing and delivering online ODL to the complex unreachable environments of prisons anywhere, and particularly in Africa, have been discussed

Deep Cross-Modal Audio-Visual Generation

Cross-modal audio-visual perception has been a long-lasting topic in psychology and neurology, and various studies have discovered strong correlations in human perception of auditory and visual stimuli. Despite works in computational multimodal modeling, the problem of cross-modal audio-visual generation has not been systematically studied in the literature. In this paper, we make the first attempt to solve this cross-modal generation problem leveraging the power of deep generative adversarial training. Specifically, we use conditional generative adversarial networks to achieve cross-modal audio-visual generation of musical performances. We explore different encoding methods for audio and visual signals, and work on two scenarios: instrument-oriented generation and pose-oriented generation. Being the first to explore this new problem, we compose two new datasets with pairs of images and sounds of musical performances of different instruments. Our experiments using both classification and human evaluations demonstrate that our model has the ability to generate one modality, i.e., audio/visual, from the other modality, i.e., visual/audio, to a good extent. Our experiments on various design choices along with the datasets will facilitate future research in this new problem space

Shaping a Healthier Generation: Healthy Kids, Healthy America State Profiles of Progress

Profiles states' efforts to advance childhood obesity prevention at the state level through childcare settings, policy prioritization, and school-based activities. Presents case studies of strategies, partnerships, and tools for coordinating policies

Second Wind: Workers, Retirement, and Social Security

In this report, Second Wind: Workers, Retirement, and Social Security, we hear from American workers about how they view retirement in our new economy, what they hope for -- and what they fear. Workers describe a vision that is not the work-free retirement for which their parents long. Rather, it is a work-filled retirement focused on fulfilling personal goals and contributing to the economy and to society. The survey finds that workers expect little support or help from government or employers in surmounting the barriers they face to their vision of a successful retirement. Workers express tepid support for corporate pension and retirement plans, and little confidence in Social Security and Medicare. In evaluating the Presidential candidates and their positions on Social Security and retirement, workers are remarkably unimpressed. Still, while Americans are willing to go it alone into old age, they hold out hope for change, for government and employers to step up their efforts to address the needs and desires of an aging workforce

Faith in Action: Using Interfaith Coalitions to Support Voluntary Caregiving Efforts

Funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Faith in Action gives small grants to programs that provide informal care for those with chronic physical or mental disabilities. Program services are provided by volunteers, and programs are supported by coalitions involving diverse religious congregations and community-based agencies. This report presents findings from a national survey of 787 Faith in Action programs funded during the 1990s; it highlights their organizational practices, successes and challenges. It also outlines the practices linked with program survival, which include hiring directors with experience in key areas, implementing volunteer training and at least quarterly supervision, involving collaborators in fundraising and volunteer recruitment, and providing diverse services