Open by Degrees: A Case of Flexibility or Personalization?

This chapter focuses on the history, development, and perceived value of The Open University UK’s BA/BSc (Hons) Open degree (hereafter referred to as “OUUK Open degree”) over the past half-century in the context of changing external pressures and addressing debates around the coherence and acceptance of such a personalized program of study. It touches on the changing views of “openness” over time, from the origins of The Open University’s “open entry” policy, through to ideas around flexibility of study, open education, and personalized learning. The chapter concludes with recommendations for other higher education institutions wishing to introduce a multidisciplinary open degree into their portfolio of curriculum

Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York's Prisons

The NYCLU set out to investigate New York's use of extreme isolation. We explored the history that led to the emergence and expansion of the practice in New York. We asked who New York subjects to extreme isolation, for what reasons, and for how long. We sought to understand and articulate its effects on prisoners and their families, as well as an often-overlooked population -- the corrections staff assigned to watch them. We compared New York's use of extreme isolation with practices in other states and asked if the widespread use of the practice violates legal standards. Finally, we considered how reforming the use of extreme isolation would affect the safety of New York's prisons and communities.In order to answer these questions, the NYCLU conducted an intensive year-long investigation. We communicated with more than 100 prisoners who have spent significant amounts of time -- in one case, more than 20 years -- inside a SHU cell. We interviewed family members and corrections staff. We consulted corrections experts, mental health professionals, lawyers and academics. We read decades of DOCCS reports and press coverage recounting the history of New York's SHU expansion. We researched the scientific and academic literature regarding the use and effects of extreme isolation. We studied domestic and international legal standards governing extreme isolation and the steps undertaken by other states to reform their use of the practice. Finally, we reviewed DOCCS' internal regulations and policies and analyzed thousands of pages of official DOCCS records obtained through New York's open records laws

Safe Local Exploration for Replanning in Cluttered Unknown Environments for Micro-Aerial Vehicles

In order to enable Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) to assist in complex, unknown, unstructured environments, they must be able to navigate with guaranteed safety, even when faced with a cluttered environment they have no prior knowledge of. While trajectory optimization-based local planners have been shown to perform well in these cases, prior work either does not address how to deal with local minima in the optimization problem, or solves it by using an optimistic global planner. We present a conservative trajectory optimization-based local planner, coupled with a local exploration strategy that selects intermediate goals. We perform extensive simulations to show that this system performs better than the standard approach of using an optimistic global planner, and also outperforms doing a single exploration step when the local planner is stuck. The method is validated through experiments in a variety of highly cluttered environments including a dense forest. These experiments show the complete system running in real time fully onboard an MAV, mapping and replanning at 4 Hz.Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2018 and RA-L 201

The conundrum of categorising requirements: managing requirements for learning on the move

This paper reports on the experience of eliciting and managing requirements on a large European-based multinational project, whose purpose is to create a system to support learning using mobile technology. The project used the socio-cognitive engineering methodology for human-centered design and the Volere shell and template to document requirements. We provide details about the project below, describe the Volere tools, and explain how and why we used a flexible categorization scheme to manage the requirements. Finally, we discuss three lessons learned: (1) provide a flexible mechanism for organizing requirements, (2) plan ahead for the RE process, and (3) do not forget 'the waiting room

SHaW Futures Academy: Design Research and Evaluation Report

Delivered as part of the English Department for Education (DfE) schools programme, and Imagined as a landmark as part of the wider regeneration of the Bromley area, SHaW Futures Academy was designed to be a centre for Science, Health and Wellbeing educational excellence, offering 11- to 19-year-olds unrivalled access to skills and opportunities on their front doorstep. SHaW Futures Academy was designed over a two year period from 2016-2017. Although currently unbuilt after planning permission was refused on appeal, it offers a useful example of how to resolve curriculum delivery and pupil management in a multi-storey school environment. The methodology employed in the research included literature reviews, precedent studies, site visits, stakeholder consultation, drawing and other forms of visualisations. Taylor’s work has been disseminated through lectures and publications including the award winning RIBA book “Urban Schools: Designing for High Density” published in 2020 and co-edited with Dr Sharon Wright of The-Learning-Crowd