Connectivism has been offered as a new learning theory for a digital age, with four key principles for learning: autonomy, connectedness, diversity, and openness. The testing ground for this theory has been massive open online courses (MOOCs). As the number of MOOC offerings increases, interest in how people interact and develop as individual learners in these complex, diverse, and distributed ...

Professional paper Previous research and commentary has underscored the importance of providing support for autonomy and promote physical and psychological well-being amongst exercisers and athletes. Autonomy support concerns the degree to which actions perceived to emanate from significant others which are supportive of individual choices, recognize the difficulty of behavioral change, and eng...

The practice of covertly administering medication is controversial. Although condemned by some as overly paternalistic, others have suggested that it may be acceptable if patients have permanent mental incapacity and refuse needed treatment. Ethical, legal, and clinical considerations become more complex when the mental incapacity is temporary and when the medication actually serves to restore ...

The ethical question addressed in this paper concerns the moral responsibility of the researcher. This question is directly connected with the task of different actors in society to reflect on the moral dimensions of research and their interrelationships in terms of moral obligations and concerns. This aspect is not discussed in the paper. When the physicians accepted the rights of the patient ...

Self-determination theory proposes that behavior change will occur and persist if it is autonomously motivated. Autonomous motivation for a behavior is theorized to be a function both of individual differences in the autonomy orientation from the General Causality Orientations Scale and of the degree of autonomy supportiveness of relevant social contexts. We tested the theory with 128 patients ...

A model explaining the relationship between task autonomy and performance is proposed that incorporates 3 different causal mechanisms. The performance benefits of task autonomy may be realized by increased motivation (motivational mechanisms), by capitalization of information asymmetries (informational mechanisms), or by better alignment with task and organizational structures (structural mecha...

In this paper, I consider a specific channel through which trust between parties to an exchange can go on to affect nations’ comparative advantage in certain industries. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals) grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of workplace organization. I hypothesize that social trust generates a comparative advantage in industries w...

Multiagent system research tries to obtain predictability of social systems whilst preserving autonomy at the level of the individual agents. In this paper, social theory is called upon to propose a solution to this version of the micromacro problem. The use of norms and learning of norms is one possible solution. An implementation of norms and normative learning is proposed and evaluated using...

Management of human resources in health is a major challenge to health systems development in Thailand. This includes planning for, production, deployment and utilization of health personnel. Although a number of measures have been instituted to meet this challenge, considerable gaps still remain. Recently, hospital autonomy was introduced with a major emphasis to improve efficiency in the deli...

There are many arguments for and against the use of autonomous-agents in ambient intelligence and intelligent environments. Some researchers maintain that it is vital to restrict autonomy of agents so that users have complete control over the system; whereas, many others maintain that there is a greater benefit to be gained by employing autonomous-agents to take some of the work load off the us...