Islamic contributions to the International Organization for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE)

This presentation introduces the International Organization for Science and Technology Education (IOSTE), outlining its history, structure, principles and activities. It discusses the role of IOSTE as a values-oriented STE research organization established in response to cold war ideologies with the aim of encouraging dialogue and academic exchange. The presentation then highlights the recent engagement of IOSTE with STE in predominantly Muslim countries. It examines quantitatively and qualitatively the increasing contributions from researchers in these countries, and outlines possible future engagements which could lead to closer research collaborations and relationships between STE academics in Muslim and non-Muslim countries.

Starting out in STEM : a study of young men and women in first year science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses

In late 2011, first year university students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses across Australia were invited to participate in the international Interests and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) study. IRIS investigates the influences on young people's decisions to choose university STEM courses and their subsequent experiences of these courses. The study also has a particular focus on the motivations and experiences of young women in courses such as physics, IT and engineering given the low rates of female participation in these fields. Around 3500 students from 30 Australian universities contributed their views on the relative importance of various school and non-school influences on their decisions, as well as insights into their experiences of university STEM courses so far. It is hoped that their contributions will help improve recruitment, retention and gender equity in STEM higher education and careers.

OSCE online : making assessment of clinical competencies transparent, accountable & authentic

Creating an authentic assessment which at once assesses competencies, scene management, communication and overall patient care is challenging in the competitive tertiary education market. Increasing student numbers and the cost of evaluating scenario based competencies serve to ensure the need for consistent objectivity and need for timely feedback to students on their performance. Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is currently the most flexible approach to competency based formative and summative assessment and widely used within paramedic degree programs. Students are understandably compelled to perform well and can be frustrated by not receiving timely and appropriate feedback. Increasingly a number of products aimed at providing a more efficient and paperless approach have begun to enter the market. These products, it is suggested are aimed at medicine programs and not at allied health professions and limited to one operating system and therefore ignore issues surrounding equity and accessibility. OSCE Online aims to address this gap in the market and is tailored to these disciplines. The application will provide a service that can be both tailored and standardised from a pre-written bank, depending upon requirement to fit around the needs of clinical competency assessment. Delivering authentic assessments to address student milestones in their training to become paramedics is the cornerstone of OSCE Online. By not being restricted to a specific device it will address issues of functionality, adaptability, accessibility, authenticity and importantly: transparency and accountability by producing contemporaneous data allowing issues to be easily identified and rectified.

Technology : A mobilising force for a radical design pedagogy [Editorial - Special Issue]

This special issue of the Journal of Learning Design, led by Jill Franz and Lindy Osborne, from the School of Design in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, is grounded in Design Education. Its papers are drawn from differing fields of design: digital media, architecture, and environmental design. Each makes use of technologies in differing ways but all share the singular purpose of achieving enhanced learning outcomes from students.

A nation’s role in addressing base erosion and profit shifting : balancing sovereignty with international collaboration and coordination

The notion of sovereignty is central to any international tax issue. While a nation is free to design its tax laws as it sees fit and raise revenue in accordance with the needs of its citizens, it is not possible to undertake such a task in isolation. In a world of cross-border investments and business transactions, all tax regimes impact on one another. Tax interactions between sovereign states cannot be avoided. Ultimately, the interactions mean that a nation must decide whether to engage in both collaboration and coordination with other nations and supranational bodies alike or maintain an individualised stance in relation to its tax policy. Whatever the decision, there is arguably an exercise in national sovereignty in some form. In the context of an international tax regime, whether that regime is interpreted broadly as meaning international norms generally adopted by nations around the world or domestic regimes legislating for cross-border transactions, rhetoric around national fiscal sovereignty takes on many different forms. At one end of the spectrum it is relied upon by financial secrecy jurisdictions (tax havens) as a defence to their position on the basis that ‘other’ nations cannot interfere with the fiscal sovereignty of a jurisdiction. At the other end of the spectrum, it is argued that profit shifting and international tax avoidance if not stopped is, in and of itself, a threat to a nation’s fiscal sovereignty on the basis that it threatens the ability to tax and raise the revenue needed. This paper considers a modern conceptualisation of sovereignty along with its role within international tax coordination and collaboration to argue that a move towards a more unified approach to addressing international base erosion and profit shifting may be the ultimate exercise of national fiscal sovereignty. By using the current transfer pricing regime as a case study, this paper posits that it is not merely enough to have international agreement on allocation rules to be applied, but that the ultimate exercise of national sovereignty is political agreement with other states to ensure that it is governments which determine the allocational basis of worldwide profits to be taxed. In doing so, it is demonstrated that the arm’s length pricing requirement of the current transfer pricing regime, rather than providing governments with the ability to determine the location of profits, is providing multinational entities with the ultimate power to determine that location. If left unchecked, this will eventually erode a nation’s ability to capture the required tax revenue and, as a consequence, may be deemed a failure by nation states to exercise their fiscal sovereignty.

Strategic capability development : a multi-level case study of the role of knowledge integration within product innovation

Capability development is at the heart of creating competitive advantage. This thesis intends to conceptualise Strategic Capability Development as a renewal of an organisation's existing capability in line with the requirements of the market. It followed and compared four product innovation projects within Iran Khodro Company (IKCO), an exemplar of capability development within the Iranian Auto industry. Findings show that the maturation of strategic capability at the organisational level has occurred through a sequence of product innovation projects and by dynamically shaping the learning and knowledge integration processes in accordance with emergence of the new structure within the industry. Accordingly, Strategic Capability Development is conceptualised in an interpretive model. Such findings are useful for development of an explanatory model and a practical capability development framework for managing learning and knowledge across different product innovation projects.

Task constraints

Newell (1985, 1986) identified the importance of interacting constraints on the emergent behaviours of learners or performers in sport as they assemble functional states of movement organisation in achieving task goals. Constraints, related to the person, task and environment, were defined as ‘boundaries or features that limit motion of the entity under consideration at any moment in time’ (Newell, 1986, p.347). Personal (or organismic) constraints include factors such as individual anthropometrics (height, weight, and limb lengths), fitness (e.g., strength, speed, aerobic capacity, and flexibility), mental skills (e.g. concentration, confidence, emotional control and motivation), perceptual and decisionmaking skills (e.g., recognising patterns of play, anticipation by reading the movements of opponents) and personality factors (e.g., risk taking or conservative behaviours). Newell (1986, p.350) distinguished between general environmental constraints, such as gravity, ambient temperature, natural light and altitude and task constraints, which are task specific and concerned with the goals of a specific activity. More recently, socio-cultural constraints (e.g., family support, cultural expectations and access to facilities) have also been considered as environmental constraints. Application of the constraints framework to the study of sport performance has led to task constraints being defined to include factors such as rules of games, equipment used, boundary playing areas and markings, nets and goals, the number of...

A nation's role in addressing base erosion and profit shifting : sovereignty in relation to transfer pricing

The notion of sovereignty is central to any international tax issue. While a nation is free to design its tax laws as it sees fit and raise revenue in accordance with the needs of its citizens, it is not possible to undertake such a task in isolation. Tax interactions between sovereign states cannot be avoided. Ultimately, the interactions mean that a nation must decide whether or engage in both collaboration and co ordination with other nations and supranational bodies alike or maintain a unilateral stance in relation to its tax policy. This article considers a modern conceptualisation of sovereignty to argue that a move towards a more unified approach to addressing international base erosion and profit sharing may be the ultimate exercise of national fiscal sovereignty.

Robotics for sustainable broad-acre agriculture

This paper describes the development of small low-cost cooperative robots for sustainable broad-acre agriculture to increase broad-acre crop production and reduce environmental impact. The current focus of the project is to use robotics to deal with resistant weeds, a critical problem for Australian farmers. To keep the overall system affordable our robot uses low-cost cameras and positioning sensors to perform a large scale coverage task while also avoiding obstacles. A multi-robot coordinator assigns parts of a given field to individual robots. The paper describes the modification of an electric vehicle for autonomy and experimental results from one real robot and twelve simulated robots working in coordination for approximately two hours on a 55 hectare field in Emerald Australia. Over this time the real robot 'sprayed' 6 hectares missing 2.6% and overlapping 9.7% within its assigned field partition, and successfully avoided three obstacles.