this paper describes one university’s approach to improving the quality of teaching and learning at the institutional level, based on the premise of improving the design of curriculum rather than focusing on the skills of teachers as such. the paper describes the process by which university-wide principles of curriculum design were defined and agreed, as well as the parallel campaigns needed to...

Leveraging on the pervasiveness of mobile phones and their rich built-in sensors, partici-patory sensing recently emerged as a promising approach to large-scale data collection. Whilst some contributors may be altruistic, many contributors are motivated by receiving something in return for their contributions, proportional to their level of contributions. In this paper, we adopt a service alloc...

tthe uncertainty estimation and compensation are challenging problems for the robust control of robot manipulators which are complex systems. this paper presents a novel decentralized model-free robust controller for electrically driven robot manipulators. as a novelty, the proposed controller employs a simple gaussian radial-basis-function network as an uncertainty estimator. the proposed netw...

the strategies to reduce the consumption of non-renewable energies in buildings are becoming increasingly important. in the meantime, nature-inspired approaches have emerged as a new strategy to achieve thermal comfort in the interiors. however, the use of these approaches in architecture and buildings requires a proper understanding regarding the features of ecosystems. although acquiring this...

background: because of educational responsibilities and direct contact with people, health personnel (known as behvarzes in iran) need to be properly educated. therefore, educating and empowering the instructors of health centers (or behvarzi centers) regarding teaching and learning processes, such as selection of educational objectives and using appropriate educational technology, can positive...

today, online social networks are very popular due to the possibility of creating relationships between people all over the world. these social networks with possibilities such as friend recommendation generally use local features derived from social graph structure. for friend recommendation, there are different algorithms with local and global approaches. in this paper, we proposed an algorit...

This paper argues that participatory research is an approach to developing knowledge that can make significant contributions to occupational therapy. One project, working with older adults in Toronto to organize a new seniors' organization, is used to illustrate the ways in which this approach is participatory and how it can be understood as research. Other examples of participatory research fr...

The vision behind community forestry is to ensure the sustainability of local forests, by engaging the local communities who depend on these resources. Community forestry is practiced widely across the globe, with varying degrees of success. This study focuses on alternative approaches and tools used to evaluate project performance (in terms of sustainability) and increase participation at the ...

Just as the notion of participatory approaches has been subjected to questioning and criticism, so has the more specific notion of participatory approaches to monitoring and evaluation. There are parallel possibilities of tokenism and even of manipulation, here, just as there are parallels around the need for more critical reflection and dialogue. Even if not actually manipulative, participator...