Expanding America's Capacity to Educate Nurses: Diverse, State-Level Partnerships Are Creating Promising Models and Results

Outlines the need to expand nursing education capacity to address the coming personnel shortage. Highlights strategies of twelve partnerships, including pay-for-performance funding and new curricula and technology, and makes policy recommendations

Bridging Certification and Community Forestry through NTFPs: A Case Study from Nepal

Issue - For a variety of reasons, community forestry is not always well suited to existing forest certification schemes. Using the case of Nepal, this paper considers the extent to which promoting the trade in nontimber forest products can complement, or even provide an alternative to, forest certification for timber while promoting sustainable community forestry. The paper develops recent work on the interaction of transnational business governance (TBG) schemes to suggest how these two approaches to sustainable forest management can work together productively

Negotiation Stands Alone

Yes, the authors concede, “everybody” negotiates: but that’s like saying “everybody drives,” and then watching aghast when “everybody” climbs into a racing car, or an eighteen-wheeled tractor trailer. The authors draw from Tsur’s experience teaching Israeli hostage negotiators and in other high-pressure environments to argue for an entirely distinct concept of a professional negotiator, one that starts with a rather experienced “student” and builds a sharply different training regimen from there

Productization and interntional product strategy of K-12 education-related services – a case study

Service business has been fast-growing industry during the past decades. Recently, scholars and executives have realized the service industry's dominance in growth of the global economy. However, service development has received remarkably less attention compared to manufacturing. Finnish government officials have newly perceived the opportunity to exploit high appreciation of Finnish education in growing, international education market. The case company aims at increasing its international presence with K-12 education-related services. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to theoretically and empirically analyze the combination of productization and international product strategy with strong focus on K-12 education-related services. The author built the theoretical framework based on literature review that analyses different stages of productization of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and the characteristics of the international product strategy. The productization process includes three main phases: service offering standardization, service offering tangibilization and concretization, and service process standardization and systematization. In international product strategy, high importance is given to standardization-adaptation dichotomy. The empirical data for this thesis was collected through interviewing the case company professionals and external experts in the field. The results show that K-12 education-related services can be productized to some extent through applying the named methods. Standardization has multiple benefits that can be achieved by developing a core product and supplementing it with more customized or preferably standardized parts and modules. However, flexibility is required in order to match the specific requirements of the target country in terms of culture, legislation and regulations

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Blended learning internationalization from the commonwealth: An Australian and Canadian collaborative case study

This case depiction addresses the contentious issue of providing culturally and globally accessible teaching and learning to international students in universities in the Commonwealth nations of Australia and Canada. The chapter describes the university systems and cultures, the barriers to authentic higher education internationalization, and the problems frequently experienced by international students. Two university cases are presented and analysed to depict and detail blended learning approaches (face-toface combined with e-learning) as exemplars of culturally and globally accessible higher education and thereby ideologically grounded internationalization. Lessons learned are presented at the systems level and as teaching and learning solutions designed to address pedagogical problems frequently experienced by international students in the areas of communication, academic skills, teaching and learning conceptualization, and moving from rote learning to critical thinking. The blended learning solutions are analysed through the lens of critical theory

Innovation-systems, path-dependency and policy: The co-evolution of science, technology and innovation policy and industrial structure in a small, resource-based economy

This paper analyses the co-evolution of science, technology and innovation policy and industrial structure in a small, resource-based economy (Norway). The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, it develops an evolutionary and historically oriented approach to the study of the development of science, technology and innovation policy based that may have wide applicability. Second, if focuses on a particular type of innovation, innovation in resource-based activities, that differs in many respects from the more commonly studied “high-tech” case and which arguably be of relevance for may present day developing countries. Third, the paper advances our understanding of the roles played by institutions and politics in innovation. Previous work on national systems of innovation has often devoted little attention to these matters, possibly because much of it examines “snapshots” of various innovation systems at a specific point in time and lacks historical depth.