UK teaching quality under the microscope : what are the drivers?

Under the newly elected government in the UK (May 2015), sweeping changes to quality assurance and the regulatory system for higher education are proposed in England.  Proposals include a new emphasis on ‘teaching excellence’ to balance a long-term emphasis on measuring ‘research excellence’ and further marketization.  The UK higher education system has had a strong reputation for quality over decades, so international observers may speculate on the rationale for the government’s proposals.  This article explores some of the underlying political, economic and social drivers behind the government’s proposals. 

Lunar International Observers Network operation during the Apollo 10 mission

Lunar International Observers Network operation during Apollo 10 missio

Operation LION - Report for period of the flight of Apollo 11

Observations by Lunar International Observers Network and astronauts of lunar phenomena during Apollo 11 fligh

Chronological Catalog of Reported Lunar Events

Chronological catalog of reported lunar events or temperature changes on moon recorded between 1540 and 1967

A Review and Evaluation of Elastic Distance Functions for Time Series Clustering

Time series clustering is the act of grouping time series data without recourse to a label. Algorithms that cluster time series can be classified into two groups: those that employ a time series specific distance measure; and those that derive features from time series. Both approaches usually rely on traditional clustering algorithms such as $k$-means. Our focus is on distance based time series that employ elastic distance measures, i.e. distances that perform some kind of realignment whilst measuring distance. We describe nine commonly used elastic distance measures and compare their performance with k-means and k-medoids clustering. Our findings are surprising. The most popular technique, dynamic time warping (DTW), performs worse than Euclidean distance with k-means, and even when tuned, is no better. Using k-medoids rather than k-means improved the clusterings for all nine distance measures. DTW is not significantly better than Euclidean distance with k-medoids. Generally, distance measures that employ editing in conjunction with warping perform better, and one distance measure, the move-split-merge (MSM) method, is the best performing measure of this study. We also compare to clustering with DTW using barycentre averaging (DBA). We find that DBA does improve DTW k-means, but that the standard DBA is still worse than using MSM. Our conclusion is to recommend MSM with k-medoids as the benchmark algorithm for clustering time series with elastic distance measures. We provide implementations in the aeon toolkit, results and guidance on reproducing results on the associated GitHub repository

Job-embedded, collaborative and reflective professional development for university administrators : the action learning pedagogy

International audienceJob-embedded, collaborative, and reflective professional development programmes have generally been praised internationally for promoting knowledge sharing and meeting the learning needs of extremely busy practitioners, such as university academic and administrative staff. However, in the Southern African context where, for a variety of reasons, professional development draws extensively on traditional pedagogies, their usefulness has not been fully tested. Analysing the experiences of 11 participants of the Programme for University Leadership in the Southern African Region (PULSAR) and subsequent developments within their own institutions, this article shows how Action Learning can be used as a tool for change for university senior administrators. Through this job-embedded, collaborative, and reflective pedagogy, Action Learning provides enabling conditions for university administrators to unlearn, learn and relearn engagement strategies (e.g., questioning and listening skills, participative teamwork) to approach workplace problems differently, and in the process, build more effective working relationships