To cope with the rapidly changing higher education climate, teachers need agency to act proactively in initiating and steering changes in practice. This paper describes an academic development activity in the form of a Change Laboratory, an intervention method based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, to facilitate agency among teachers. The results of the study indicate that transformative agency emerges when teachers are given the opportunity to analyse, envision, and redesign their practice collaboratively. This has implications for academic development, suggesting that activities facilitating discussion, analysis, and criticism of current practices are needed to support the development of agency.

Teaching quality improvements frequently focus upon the ‘development’ of individual academics in higher education. However, research also shows that the academics’ context has considerable influence upon their practices. This study examines the working environments of teachers on an online pharmacy programme, investigating contextual conditions that facilitate or impede academic change and development. Interview data and institutional policy documents are examined within a Cultural-Historical Activity Theory framework. Distinct differences in the teachers’ sociocultural context were identified as influencing change and development. Departmental teaching cultures and patterns of communication influenced practice both positively, by offering collegial support, and negatively by impeding change. The findings have significance for academic development strategies. They suggest that departmental-level support should include communicative pathways that promote reflection upon and development of conceptions of teaching and learning.

Investors raise profit from stock market by maximising gains and minimising loses. The profit is difficult to raise because of the volatile nature of stock market prices. Predictive modelling allows investors to make informed decisions. In this paper, we compare four forecasting models: autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), vector autoregression (VAR), long short-term memory (LSTM) and nonlinear autoregressive Exogenous (NARX). The results of predictive modelling are analysed and compared in terms of prediction accuracy. The research aims to develop a new profitable trading strategy. Our findings are: (i) the NARX model has provided accurate short-term predictions but failed long forecasts, and (ii) the VAR model can form a good trend line required for trading. Thus, the profitable trading strategy can combine the machine learning predictive modelling and technical analysis.

The study proposes an organizational design framework that impacts innovation in corporate firms. In an emerging economy like Oman, innovation helps to reduce the dependence on oil revenues and enhance its international competitiveness. However, the corporate organizations in emerging economies are unable to innovate effectively because they are not designed for innovation. Further, scarcity of resources undermines their readiness for innovation. This study empirically validates measures of an entrepreneurial organizational design framework in Omani corporate sector. In order to explain how a corporate organizational design promotes innovation and clarify the missing links between corporate entrepreneurial activity and innovation, the mediating role of readiness for innovation (RFI) is tested. Using a quantitative research approach, data is collected from 401 corporate firms in Oman and analysed using structural equation modelling. The findings support the proposition that entrepreneurial organizational design promotes both radical and incremental innovation degree and frequency, while RFI partially mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial inputs and innovation outputs. The study contributes to the understanding of innovation in emerging economies as it explains that RFI helps firms to enhance its innovation potential by optimizing its resources, capabilities and processes for innovation. These measures are essential for organizations, particularly in emerging economies focused on low cost innovation. The findings of the study will inform managerial decision-making in terms of designing organizations for innovation and implementation of measures related to readiness for innovation. PDF

Book review of Breaking Through the Language Arts Block Organizing and Managing the Exemplary Literacy Day Lesley Mandel Morrow, Kenneth Kunz, and Maureen Hall Guilford Press, 2018 9781462534463

In this paper, links between the concepts of long-term care and lifelong learning are suggested, and notions of care and the author’s construction of the Pedagogic Third will be proposed. The psychoanalysis of children stresses the importance of symbolic play, during which the child uses games to master internal conflicts. Analogous results might emerge from play that engages adult learners. However, where play helps children define roles and accept rule-regulated behaviour, we consider to what extent an adult learner is addressing desires which cannot be satisfied because they are too threatening, or desires which cannot be satisfied in reality and which are represented symbolically in play as an alternative. In order to work through these ideas, we consider a comedic representation of a hospital ward and an extract from the diary of a midwife who was also a long-term patient. The author’s contribution to the conference was a workshop and not the presentation of a paper. As such, this paper has been written in retrospect and is consequently reflective in stance. Much of the work described in this paper is connected to a larger piece of work, a monograph in progress, due to be published in 2019.

Book review of Educating Outside: Curriculum-linked outdoor learning ideas for primary teachers By: Helen Porter Bloomsbury Education, 2018 9781472946300

Book review of Inside Teaching: How to Make a Difference for Every Learner and Teacher By John Blanchard Routledge, 2017 9781138712294

Book review of Working together for children: a critical introduction to multi-agency working, Gary Walker, Continuum, 2008, 9780826498175

The annotation of the tumour from medical scans is a crucial step in nephroblastoma treatment. Therefore, an accurate and reliable segmentation method is needed to facilitate the evaluation and the treatments of the tumour. The proposed method serves this purpose by performing the segmentation of nephroblastoma in MRI scans. The segmentation is performed by adapting and a 2D free hand drawing tool to select a region of interest in the scan slices. Results from 24 patients show a mean root-mean-square error of 0.0481 ± 0.0309, an average Dice coefficient of 0.9060 ± 0.0549 and an average accuracy of 99.59% ± 0.0039. Thus the proposed method demonstrated an effective agreement with manual annotations.