Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design: final synthesis report

This report provides a final synthesis of findings, deliverables and outcomes from the JISC Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design Programme (the 'Design Programme'), based on the final reports from projects. The report also includes quotes and commentary from ‘Report to JISC: Senior Management Project Interviews’ produced by Professor Peter Chatterton.

Promoting the institutional repository at the University of West London

Implementing resource discovery techniques at the University of West London Promoting the institutional repository at the University of West London

Enriching the content provided by cultural catalogues with data from institutional repositories

[EN] This paper is an outcome of the ERASMUS IP program called TOPCART, there are more information about this project that can be accessed from the following item:

Football Manager App

El objetivo de este proyecto ha sido la realización de una aplicación para tablets con sistema operativo iOS de Apple. La aplicación la puede utilizar cualquier persona con inquietudes sobre el mundo del fútbol, pero está pensada básicamente para entrenadores que busquen almacenar datos relacionados con sus equipos, jugadores, partidos, estadísticas de los equipos y los jugadores, etc. La información introducida quedará almacenada hasta que el usuario decida lo contrario eliminando los datos que ya no desee tener en su dispositivo de manera fácil e intuitiva. Aparte de eso, se ha desarrollado una pizarra táctil donde el usuario podrá realizar sus tácticas previas al partido y enseñársela a sus jugadores. Dispondrá de dos colores para diferenciar los diferentes jugadores que se dibujen. Además, se pueden realizar ligas online para que varios usuarios simultáneamente accedan a su contenido o lo modifiquen. Las ligas podrán ser reales a nivel profesional, de amigos o incluso ligas de videojuegos. Se ha realizado un apartado de mensajería donde los usuarios se podrán comunicar entre ellos sin salir de la aplicación. Bastará con buscar al usuario en el sistema, seleccionarlo y mandarle un mensaje. Si un usuario decide eliminar todos sus datos del sistema, podrá hacerlo y se eliminará cualquier información relacionada con él.

A gestão em saúde e as ferramentas gerenciais: a experiência com o SISPLAN do Instituto Nacional de Câncer

A gestão na área de saúde vem sofrendo modificações ao longo do tempo. As últimas duas décadas foram voltadas para o crescimento e implementação da gestão profissional neste setor, com o suporte do uso de sistemas de planejamento informatizados como apoio à gestão. Assim, este estudo tem como principal fio condutor as premissas da Gestão e do uso de ferramentas gerenciais. Embora não seja um estudo de caso, apoia-se em uma experiência concreta de gestão no Instituto Nacional de Câncer do Rio de Janeiro. Nesta pesquisa é observado que as organizações de saúde sempre estiveram voltadas para a assistência sem preocupação com a gestão em si, mas que a partir da crise econômica mundial dos anos 80 houve mudanças neste cenário. Estas alterações ocorreram não somente na gestão da saúde, como também na profissionalização do gestor. O uso de ferramentas gerenciais também é contemplado nesta pesquisa, porquanto hoje se debate a sua importância no auxílio do planejamento e da estratégia a ser orientada para estas organizações. Paralelamente à discussão sobre os sistemas mais usados nas empresas e organizações de saúde, é discutida como ferramenta gerencial principal nesta tese o Sistema de Planejamento (SISPLAN) do Instituto Nacional de Câncer do Rio de Janeiro, um instrumento desenvolvido na Instituição e que vem redesenhando os espaços institucionais de decisão e de discussão de políticas. Este estudo demonstra que a aplicação desta ferramenta gerencial possibilitou a implementação dos projetos prioritários e mais relevantes. Como ferramenta gerencial, o SISPLAN facilitou o desenvolvimento de uma gestão participativa e compartilhada em todos os níveis. Apesar das melhorias que ainda são necessárias para o aperfeiçoamento deste instrumento, são inegáveis as conquistas obtidas no transcorrer deste processo. Percebe-se, contudo, que apesar das suas características o SISPLAN não parece ser a ferramenta gerencial que expresse a estratégia da instituição, pois ele se comporta como uma ferramenta de planejamento. Assim, conclui-se que pelas características apresentadas durante o estudo, que o balanced scorecard deva ser associado ao SISPLAN como uma ferramenta gerencial complementar para permitir a construção da estratégia, baseada em uma cadeia de relações de causa e efeito e de fatores impulsionadores. Esta tese vem demonstrar que a disponibilização de uma ferramenta gerencial é fundamental para o sucesso da gestão.

Fish quality and processing in Malawi: responding to challenges through institutional capacity building

Fish processing and quality control in Malawi are still poorly developed. Traditional fish processing methods are widely employed resulting in considerable post-harvest losses. One of the major challenges to steady and sustainable development in fish processing and quality management is the lack of adequately trained personel. This is directly reflected in poor institutional capacity. This project analyses the situation in fish processing and quality management in Malawi to identify gaps that require improvement. Specifically, the project assesses the role of training institutions in Malawi in capacity building for fish processing and quality management. The institution under discussion in this project is the Aquaculture and Fisheries Science Department at Bunda College of Agriculture, Malawi which is responsible for training students in aquaculture and fisheries science at the undergraduate level.Improvement in the teaching of fish processing and quality management in the Department of Aquaculture and Fisheries Science was identified as the major gap requiring action. The current teaching syllabus was thus analysed to identify weak areas. In conclusion, the project developed (as the major output) a teaching handbook for the Department of Aquaculture and Fisheries Science.

Institutional, policy and regulatory framework for sustainable development of the Egyptian aquaculture sector

This report presents the findings of a mission to critically review the institutional, policy and regulatory framework for sustainable development of the Egyptian aquaculture sector. The study was undertaken by an International Expert on Aquaculture Policy, and a National Expert on Institutions, on behalf of the Project “Improving Employment and Income through the Development of Egypt’s Aquaculture Sector“, implemented by WorldFish and CARE, and funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation(SDC). The objective of the mission was to assess the current status of the Egyptian aquaculture sector, in terms of the policy, legal and institutional environment, with a view to suggesting the major issues to be addressed within a future policy dialogue.

Institutional support for freshwater aquaculture development: a study of Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh, India

The aquaculture sector has been playing an increasingly dominating role in Indian fisheries scenario since the last two and half decades. Introduction of induced breeding and composite fish culture (CFC) technologies has changed the freshwater aquaculture sector in India. Institutional support has been one of the most crucial aspects in all fisheries development programs, more so in the Indian context where most of fish farmers are socially and economically weak. The innovation of CFC technology in freshwater aquaculture sector in the early seventies generated the need for adequate and effective institutional support to farmers. Under the freshwater aquaculture development program, the Fish Farmers Development Agencies (FFDA) have been established at district level to provide technical and extension support to the farming community besides arranging ponds on lease and supply of seeds. In addition to above, FFDAs are also expected to arrange loans from banks and provide subsidies. Thus, FFDAs are meant to provide institutional support to fish farming community in the country. In view of the above, an effort was made to study the adequacy and effectiveness of institutional support provided by the FFDA, Mirzapur for the development of aquaculture in Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh {U.P.), India. Study reveals that leasing of ponds for fish farming has been favourable to economically weaker sections of societies while bank loan accessibility is more for those having relatively higher economic status. Though the FFDA, Mirzapur performed well in providing training to potential fish farmers and creating awareness about fish farming, its effectiveness could not be equally seen in seed supply.

Effective handling of dialogue state in the hidden information state POMDP-based dialogue manager

Effective dialogue management is critically dependent on the information that is encoded in the dialogue state. In order to deploy reinforcement learning for policy optimization, dialogue must be modeled as a Markov Decision Process. This requires that the dialogue statemust encode all relevent information obtained during the dialogue prior to that state. This can be achieved by combining the user goal, the dialogue history, and the last user action to form the dialogue state. In addition, to gain robustness to input errors, dialogue must be modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and hence, a distribution over all possible states must be maintained at every dialogue turn. This poses a potential computational limitation since there can be a very large number of dialogue states. The Hidden Information State model provides a principled way of ensuring tractability in a POMDP-based dialogue model. The key feature of this model is the grouping of user goals into partitions that are dynamically built during the dialogue. In this article, we extend this model further to incorporate the notion of complements. This allows for a more complex user goal to be represented, and it enables an effective pruning technique to be implemented that preserves the overall system performance within a limited computational resource more effectively than existing approaches. © 2011 ACM.