Gearing Up: An Interim Report on the Sectoral Employment Initiative

Gearing Up is the first P/PV report on the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation's Sectoral Employment Initiative. It provides information about the various strategies being pursued, who is participating, and the sites' successes and struggles through the initiative's first two years. The report concludes with observations on those factors that appear critical to participating organizations' attaining their goals

Using Gameplay Patterns to Gamify Learning Experiences

Gamification refers to the use of gaming elements to enhance user experience and engagement in non-gaming systems. In this paper we report the design and implementation of two higher education courses in which ludic elements were used to enhance the quality of the learning experience. A game can be regarded as a system of organised gameplay activities, and a course can be regarded as a system of organised learning activities. Leveraging this analogy, analysing games can provide valuable insights to organise learning activities within a learning experience. We examined a sample of successful commercial games to identify patterns of organisation of gameplay activities that could be applied to a course design. Five patterns were identified: quest structure, strategic open-endedness, non-linear progression, orientation, and challenge-based reward. These patterns were then used to define the instructional design of the courses. As a result, courses were organised as systems of quests that could be tackled through different strategies and in a non-linear way. Students received frequent feedback and were rewarded according to the challenges chosen, based on mechanics common in quest-based games. The courses involved two lecturers and 70 students. Learning journals were used throughout the term to collect data regarding student perceptions on the clarity and usefulness of the gamified approach, level of motivation and engagement in the courses, and relevance of the activities proposed. Results show that students felt challenged by the activities proposed and motivated to complete them, despite considering most activities as difficult. Students adopted different cognitive and behavioural strategies to cope with the courses’ demands. They had to define their own team project, defining the objectives, managing their times and coordinating task completion. The regular and frequent provision of feedback was highly appreciated. A sense of mastery was promoted and final achievement was positively impacted by the gamified strategy

Measuring the software process and product: Lessons learned in the SEL

The software development process and product can and should be measured. The software measurement process at the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has taught a major lesson: develop a goal-driven paradigm (also characterized as a goal/question/metric paradigm) for data collection. Project analysis under this paradigm leads to a design for evaluating and improving the methodology of software development and maintenance

Targeting Industries, Training Workers and Improving Opportunities: The Final Report from the Sectoral Employment Initiative

Over the past 30 years, American workers have faced daunting challenges, including declines in real wages and dwindling upward mobility. Paths to advance within companies have deteriorated, leaving many low-skilled workers "stuck" indefinitely in low-wage jobs -- and swelling the ranks of the working poor. As opportunities for less-educated workers to access well-paying jobs grow scarce, it is clear that our nation requires new approaches to workforce development.In a departure from traditional strategies, some workforce organizations have begun to implement services and activities that focus on the needs of specific industry sectors. By identifying local sectors that lack workers -- which might range from health care to manufacturing to construction -- these organizations can help low-income workers acquire the specific skills they need to fill available positions. To explore the potential of this approach, P/PV launched the Sectoral Employment Initiative (SEI) in 1998, with support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. This final report relies on data gathered during interviews with staff members at the SEI organizations and other key players in the targeted sectors, site visits, reviews of program documentation, and baseline and follow-up interviews with program participants focusing on a range of outcomes, including employment, earnings, education, housing and household income. The report presents key findings and explores some of the challenges sectoral programs encountered

An ideal model of an assistive technology assessment and delivery process

The purpose of the present work is to present some aspects of the Assistive Technology Assessment (ATA) process model compatible with the Position Paper 2012 by AAATE/EASTIN. Three aspects of the ATA process will be discussed in light of three topics of the Position Paper 2012: (i) The dimensions and the measures of the User eXperience (UX) evaluation modelled in the ATA process as a way to verify the efficient and the evidence-based practices of an AT service delivery centre; (ii) The relevance of the presence of the psychologist in the multidisciplinary team of an AT service delivery centre as necessary for a complete person-centred assistive solution empowering users to make their own choices; (iii) The new profession of the psychotechnologist, who explores users needs by seeking a proper assistive solution, leading the multidisciplinary team to observe critical issues and problems. Through the foundation of the Position Paper 2012, the 1995 HEART study, the Matching Person and Technology model, the ICF framework, and the pillars of the ATA process, this paper sets forth a concept and approach that emphasise the personal factors of the individual consumer and UX as key to positively impacting a successful outcome and AT solution

Telehealth: acceptability, clinical interventions and quality of life in peritoneal dialysis

Introduction: Telehealth technologies are being widely adopted across the globe for management of long-term conditions. There are limited data on its use, effectiveness and patient experience in end-stage renal disease. The aim of this pilot project was to explore patient acceptability of technology and evaluate its effect on clinical interventions and quality of life in patients undergoing peritoneal dialysis. Methods: Peritoneal dialysis patients were provided with computer tablets (PODs). PODs contained a knowledge database with treatment- and symptom-based questionnaires that generated alerts for the clinical team. Alerts were reviewed daily and followed up by a telephone call or clinic visit. Interventions were at the discretion of clinicians. Data were recorded prospectively and quality of life and Quebec User Evaluation of Satisfaction with assistive Technology questionnaires evaluated at the start and end of the programme. Results: In all, 22 patients have participated over 15 months. The mean age was 61.6 years and PODs were utilised for an average of 341.9 days with 59.1% choosing to continue beyond the study period. We received a total of 1195 alerts with an average of 2.6 alerts per day. A total of 36 admissions were avoided and patients supported to self-manage on 154 occasions. Quebec User Evaluation of Satisfaction with assistive Technology scores remained high throughout the programme although no improvement in quality of life was seen. Discussion: Telehealth is useful to monitor patients with renal failure on peritoneal dialysis. It is acceptable across age groups and provides an additional resource for patients to self-manage. Satisfaction scores and retention rates suggest a high level of acceptability

Decision Stream: Cultivating Deep Decision Trees

Various modifications of decision trees have been extensively used during the past years due to their high efficiency and interpretability. Tree node splitting based on relevant feature selection is a key step of decision tree learning, at the same time being their major shortcoming: the recursive nodes partitioning leads to geometric reduction of data quantity in the leaf nodes, which causes an excessive model complexity and data overfitting. In this paper, we present a novel architecture - a Decision Stream, - aimed to overcome this problem. Instead of building a tree structure during the learning process, we propose merging nodes from different branches based on their similarity that is estimated with two-sample test statistics, which leads to generation of a deep directed acyclic graph of decision rules that can consist of hundreds of levels. To evaluate the proposed solution, we test it on several common machine learning problems - credit scoring, twitter sentiment analysis, aircraft flight control, MNIST and CIFAR image classification, synthetic data classification and regression. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the standard decision tree learning methods on both regression and classification tasks, yielding a prediction error decrease up to 35%

Standard operating procedures (SOP) in experimental stroke research: SOP for middle cerebral artery occlusion in the mouse

Recently, systematic reviews have found quantitative evidence that low study quality may have introduced a bias into preclinical stroke research. Monitoring, auditing, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) are already key elements of quality control in randomized clinical trials and will hopefully be widely adopted by preclinical stroke research in the near future. Increasingly, funding bodies and review boards overseeing animal experiments are taking a proactive stance, and demand auditable quality control measures in preclinical research. Every good quality control system is based on its SOPs. This article introduces the concept of quality control and presents for the first time an SOP in experimental stroke research

Needs and challenges for online language teachers - the ECML project DOTS

The growing use of digital technologies in educational settings, paralleled by a paradigm change in educational theory from an instructivist transmission approach to constructivist and sociocultural theories of learning, demands more adapted teacher training programs, both technical and pedagogical. Looking at factors influencing teachers’ implementation of ICT in the foreign language classroom and guided by the results of a needs analysis survey conducted among twenty six language teachers from twenty five different European countries, the DOTS project aims to develop an online workspace with bite-sized learning objects for autonomous use by language professionals, particularly freelance teachers who frequently miss out on the training opportunities provided for their full-time colleagues