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- Habibipour, Abdolrasoul, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Criteria for Quality Assurance to Develop MOOC Courses on Climate Change
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of The 4th International Academic Conference on Education.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article is focused on identifying criteria for quality assurance to develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), with a particular emphasis on developing MOOC on the usage of disruptive information technologies (DITs) as tools to work on climate change mitigation efforts. The research has been done within the context of Living Laboratory in Climate Change (LiLaCC) project, which is an Erasmus+ Capacity-Building project in the field of Higher Education, with its six university partners in Europe and Africa. In so doing, a literature review on understanding criteria for quality assurance for MOOCs has been conducted. The literature review then formed the basis to develop empirical data collection tool, i.e., open-ended questionnaire. The six university partners then reflected on the identified criteria and also identified several other aspects that needs to be taken into account, when it comes to develop MOOCs, with a particular focus on climate change issues. Accordingly, eight overarching themes for quality assurance were identified, namely 1) organization of the lecture, 2) teaching quality, 3) methodology, 4) technical aspects, 5) motivation and culture, 6) delivery of MOOCs, 7) assessment, and 8) dissemination and promotion of MOOCs. Each of the themes includes several factors for quality assurance that can be used by both university researchers as well as practitioners in the field. The article provides a regulatory framework for matters related to teaching, learning, supervision and admissions to the MOOC in climate change.
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| 2. |
- Madrigal-Gonzalez, Jaime, et al.
(författare)
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Climate reverses directionality in the richness-abundance relationship across the World's main forest biomes
- 2020
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Ingår i: Nature Communications. - : Nature Publishing Group. - 2041-1723. ; 11:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- More tree species can increase the carbon storage capacity of forests (here referred to as the more species hypothesis) through increased tree productivity and tree abundance resulting from complementarity, but they can also be the consequence of increased tree abundance through increased available energy (more individuals hypothesis). To test these two contrasting hypotheses, we analyse the most plausible pathways in the richness-abundance relationship and its stability along global climatic gradients. We show that positive effect of species richness on tree abundance only prevails in eight of the twenty-three forest regions considered in this study. In the other forest regions, any benefit from having more species is just as likely (9 regions) or even less likely (6 regions) than the effects of having more individuals. We demonstrate that diversity effects prevail in the most productive environments, and abundance effects become dominant towards the most limiting conditions. These findings can contribute to refining cost-effective mitigation strategies based on fostering carbon storage through increased tree diversity. Specifically, in less productive environments, mitigation measures should promote abundance of locally adapted and stress tolerant tree species instead of increasing species richness. Correlations between tree species diversity and tree abundance are well established, but the direction of the relationship is unresolved. Here the authors use path models to estimate plausible causal pathways in the diversity-abundance relationship across 23 global forests regions, finding a lack of general support for a positive diversity-abundance relationship, which is prevalent in the most productive lands on Earth only
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