Lessons from Flanders: drivers & pitfalls of cooperation on a business park

For almost ten years several companies located in De Zaubeek Business Park in Flanders have been collaborating with the goal of creating a more sustainable industrial zone. Many initiatives have been developed in this business park, many successful, but some clearly pointed to constraints that require action beyond the reach of the companies or the business association. The former chairman of the association has been involved in several of these initiatives and we asked him to tell his story

Using What Academics Really Think to Develop Our Teaching Offer: Mapping the Learner Journey at the University of Worcester

Developing students’ academic skills is central to the higher education experience, but what assumptions do course teams make about the skills students have at the start of their course? What expectations do they have about how these skills should develop throughout the degree programme, and how are these articulated to students? These were just some of the questions we posed to academic staff at the University of Worcester as part of a pedagogic research project to refresh our teaching offer. Our initial aim had been to develop a menu of options that helped staff understand what we could deliver and how it might fit into their curricula. It quickly became apparent that such a tool needed to be underpinned by academic understanding of students’ skills and development, in a much broader sense than ‘just’ information literacy. Thus the learner journey project was born. Academic Liaison Librarians were tasked with conducting informal interviews with staff, often over a coffee, with a few prompt questions to ask where needed. Consciously avoiding the term ‘information literacy’, they questioned staff about the broad skill base that students bring with them and develop at university, mapping their view of the student learner journey from pre-entry to graduation. Although starting out as a small-scale project, it soon piqued the interest of senior management at the university, and grew into a much larger piece of work. Through focusing on broader skills’ development, we have developed a body of evidence and data that has wide interest and application for both academic Institutes and other professional services (e.g. Disability & Dyslexia). Alongside highlighting themes, the data has demonstrated inconsistencies across the university and even within departments, with disparate staff attitudes towards such topics as progression, student confidence, and learner independence. These results have been shared widely across the university, for course teams to discuss, all of which has served to raise Library Services’ teaching and pedagogic profile

The EU societal awareness of landscape indicator: a review of its meaning, utility and performance across different scales

There is increasing recognition that agricultural landscapes meet multiple societal needs and demands beyond provision of economic and environmental goods and services. Accordingly, there have been significant calls for the inclusion of societal, amenity and cultural values in agri-environmental landscape indicators to assist policy makers in monitoring the wider impacts of land-based policies. However, capturing the amenity and cultural values that rural agrarian areas provide, by use of such indicators, presents significant challenges. The EU social awareness of landscape indicator represents a new class of generalized social indicator using a top-down methodology to capture the social dimensions of landscape without reference to the specific structural and cultural characteristics of individual landscapes. This paper reviews this indicator in the context of existing agri-environmental indicators and their differing design concepts. Using a stakeholder consultation approach in five case study regions, the potential and limitations of the indicator are evaluated, with a particular focus on its perceived meaning, utility and performance in the context of different user groups and at different geographical scales. This analysis supplements previous EU-wide assessments, through regional scale assessment of the limitations and potentialities of the indicator and the need for further data collection. The evaluation finds that the perceived meaning of the indicator does not vary with scale, but in common with all mapped indicators, the usefulness of the indicator, to different user groups, does change with scale of presentation. This indicator is viewed as most useful when presented at the scale of governance at which end users operate. The relevance of the different sub-components of the indicator are also found to vary across regions

TDI based automotive seating: Solutions for enhancing foam durability

Improving the comfort and durability properties of automotive seating is an increasingly important issue within the global automotive seating industry. The technology for enhancing the comfort properties of polyurethane foams is one of the major needs of seating foam manufacturers and seat producers, whose focus is both foam density reduction and overall weight reduction of car seats. Shell Chemicals has therefore embarked on a fundamental program, focusing on the foam formulation-durability relation of TDI-based foam grades. The study consists of a thorough investigation of the influence of independent formulation variables such as raw materials composition, water level and ancillary chemicals levels on foam processing and durability performance. A statistics driven experimental approach (central composite and full factorial designs) helped to increase the predictive power of the outcome, concerning overall mechanical foam properties and comfort performance in particular