Activity-based CAL design: A theoretically-based design method for CAL materials

There has been more than a decade of initiatives to help promote and develop technology in Higher Education. The UK Government has funded projects such as the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI), and Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP), but technology in teaching and learning has still not had the impact promised for Higher Education (Geoghegan 1994). However, Sir Ron Dearing's National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education (1997) reiterated the commitment to technology in future teaching and learning. At the end of Phase 2 of the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme in 1996, Coopers & Lybrand; the University of London's Institute of Education; and the Tavistock Institute were jointly commissioned to carry out an evaluation of the programme so far. The report was, overall, quite critical of the results of the TLTP. The report recommended that for future development of 'courseware' there be "expertise in design, pedagogy, evaluation and management" - expertise that was not universally found in the projects evaluated. The report also found few "projects which had taken account of pedagogic issues in any systematic way." The report went as far as to say that previous research about the use of technology in Higher Education had simply been ignored. This dissertation presents research addressing these recommendations, with the intent of enhancing future Higher Education Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) materials. This dissertation proposes that one reason for the poor quality of CAL materials, and hence their poor uptake in Higher Education, is the lack of suitable design methods to inform and guide educational software developers. Structured methods for instructional materials do exist - commonly known as Instructional Systems Design (ISD) - however, this dissertation argues that the model of the teaching and learning process implied by ISD is in conflict with current thinking in Higher Education. This dissertation claims that: 1. A new design method based on a more appropriate model of the teaching and learning process can be created. 2. The new design method enhances the CAL design process by focussing designers on pedagogic issues. 3. Scenarios can be used to assist the development of a new design method. In order to understand the requirements for a new design method, design as a general discipline must first be considered. The rationale and benefits of a formal method for design are also considered. Several models of the educational process are discussed in order to find a model suitable for Higher Education. It is proposed that Laurillard's Conversational Framework (1993) is both a suitable model for Higher Education, and a suitable basis for a new design method. Reviews of existing Higher Education CAL materials, evaluated against the Conversational Framework, are presented to support the choice of educational model. Techniques from interactive systems design, commonly used for developing product designs, are described and shown to also be useful in the creation of design methods. The design method produced, called the Activity-Based CAL method or ABC method, is a major outcome of the research recorded here. Following a series of refinements the completed design method was evaluated. Two experiments were conducted: the first experiment presented is a comparative observational study of developers given a design task to perform. One group of developers used the new method, the other used any means they felt appropriate. The second experiment was a comparative study of the new method against an existing method based on a different educational model. Again two groups of 10 subjects were used, this time the subjects were research students and research staff of a computing science department. Protocol Analysis was used on the resulting data collected from both experiments. Results of the analysis demonstrate that use of the new design method caused developers to discuss more high-level pedagogic issues rather than low-level interface and presentational issues - i.e. forcing them to consider pedagogy, which the Cooper Lybrand report (1996) indicated was necessary for future CAL developments. The dissertation concludes that: 1. A new design method - The ABC method - can be created based on a suitable model of the teaching and learning process for Higher Education - Laurillard's Conversational Framework. 2. The ABC method enhances the CAL design process, by focussing designers on pedagogic design issues. 3. Scenarios can be used to assist the development of a new design method. A discussion of the comments given by subjects in the evaluation questionnaire follows, which leads to a discussion of the how the ABC method could be further developed

Investigating five key predictive text entry with combined distance and keystroke modelling

This paper investigates text entry on mobile devices using only five-keys. Primarily to support text entry on smaller devices than mobile phones, this method can also be used to maximise screen space on mobile phones. Reported combined Fitt's law and keystroke modelling predicts similar performance with bigram prediction using a five-key keypad as is currently achieved on standard mobile phones using unigram prediction. User studies reported here show similar user performance on five-key pads as found elsewhere for novice nine-key pad users

Too Big to Fail — U.S. Banks’ Regulatory Alchemy: Converting an Obscure Agency Footnote into an “At Will” Nullification of Dodd-Frank’s Regulation of the Multi-Trillion Dollar Financial Swaps Market

The multi-trillion-dollar market for, what was at that time wholly unregulated, over-the-counter derivatives (“swaps”) is widely viewed as a principal cause of the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown. The Dodd-Frank Act, signed into law on July 21, 2010, was expressly considered by Congress to be a remedy for this troublesome deregulatory problem. The legislation required the swaps market to comply with a host of business conduct and anti-competitive protections, including that the swaps market be fully transparent to U.S. financial regulators, collateralized, and capitalized. The statute also expressly provides that it would cover foreign subsidiaries of big U.S. financial institutions if their swaps trading could adversely impact the U.S. economy or represent the use of extraterritorial trades as an attempt to “evade” Dodd-Frank. In July 2013, the CFTC promulgated an 80-page, triple-columned, and single-spaced “guidance” implementing Dodd-Frank’s extraterritorial reach, i.e., that manner in which Dodd-Frank would apply to swaps transactions executed outside the United States. The key point of that guidance was that swaps trading within the “guaranteed” foreign subsidiaries of U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers were subject to all of Dodd-Frank’s swaps regulations wherever in the world those subsidiaries’ swaps were executed. At that time, the standardized industry swaps agreement contemplated that, inter alia, U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers’ foreign subsidiaries would be “guaranteed” by their corporate parent, as was true since 1992. In August 2013, without notifying the CFTC, the principal U.S. bank holding company swaps dealer trade association privately circulated to its members standard contractual language that would, for the first time, “deguarantee” their foreign subsidiaries. By relying only on the obscure footnote 563 of the CFTC guidance’s 662 footnotes, the trade association assured its swaps dealer members that the newly deguaranteed foreign subsidiaries could (if they so chose) no longer be subject to Dodd-Frank. As a result, it has been reported (and it also has been understood by many experts within the swaps industry) that a substantial portion of the U.S. swaps market has shifted from the large U.S. bank holding companies swaps dealers and their U.S. affiliates to their newly deguaranteed “foreign” subsidiaries, with the attendant claim by these huge big U.S. bank swaps dealers that Dodd-Frank swaps regulation would not apply to these transactions. The CFTC also soon discovered that these huge U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers were “arranging, negotiating, and executing” (“ANE”) these swaps in the United States with U.S. bank personnel and, only after execution in the U.S., were these swaps formally “assigned” to the U.S. banks’ newly “deguaranteed” foreign subsidiaries with the accompanying claim that these swaps, even though executed in the U.S., were not covered by Dodd-Frank. In October 2016, the CFTC proposed a rule that would have closed the “deguarantee” and “ANE” loopholes completely. However, because it usually takes at least a year to finalize a “proposed” rule, this proposed rule closing the loopholes in question was not finalized prior to the inauguration of President Trump. All indications are that it will never be finalized during a Trump Administration. Thus, in the shadow of the recent tenth anniversary of the Lehman failure, there is an understanding among many market regulators and swaps trading experts that large portions of the swaps market have moved from U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers and their U.S. affiliates to their newly deguaranteed foreign affiliates where Dodd- Frank swaps regulation is not being followed. However, what has not moved abroad is the very real obligation of the lender of last resort to rescue these U.S. swaps dealer bank holding companies if they fail because of poorly regulated swaps in their deguaranteed foreign subsidiaries, i.e., the U.S. taxpayer. While relief is unlikely to be forthcoming from the Trump Administration or the Republican-controlled Senate, some other means will have to be found to avert another multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout and/or a financial calamity caused by poorly regulated swaps on the books of big U.S. banks. This paper notes that the relevant statutory framework affords state attorneys general and state financial regulators the right to bring so-called “parens patriae” actions in federal district court to enforce, inter alia, Dodd- Frank on behalf of a state’s citizens. That kind of litigation to enforce the statute’s extraterritorial provisions is now badly needed

Effect of Antiplatelet Therapy on Survival and Organ Support–Free Days in Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19

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