Reform Project Research Articles

Integrating LLMs and software-defined resources for enhanced demonstrative cloud computing education in university curricula

This paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Software-Defined Resources (SDR) as innovative tools for enhancing cloud computing education in university curricula. The study emphasizes the importance of practical knowledge in cloud technologies such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), DevOps, and cloud-native environments. It introduces Lean principles to optimize the teaching framework, promoting efficiency and effectiveness in learning. By examining a comprehensive educational reform project, the research demonstrates that incorporating SDR and LLMs can significantly enhance student engagement and learning outcomes, while also providing essential hands-on skills required in today’s dynamic cloud computing landscape. A key innovation of this study is the development and application of the Entropy-Based Diversity Efficiency Analysis (EDEA) framework, a novel method to measure and optimize the diversity and efficiency of educational content. The EDEA analysis yielded surprising results, showing that applying SDR (i.e., using cloud technologies) and LLMs can each improve a course’s Diversity Efficiency Index (DEI) by approximately one-fifth. The integrated approach presented in this paper provides a structured tool for continuous improvement in education and demonstrates the potential for modernizing educational strategies to better align with the evolving needs of the cloud computing industry.

The Writer Sweating at His Desk: Labor and Literature in Fatḥī Ghānim’s al-Jabal

Abstract Debates about the role of literature in postcolonial Egypt took place within a broader discourse on the mobilization of labor and the creation of a national productive economy. Reading the archive of early issues of the pioneering journal Al-Ghad, this article shows that Egyptian progressive writers in the early 1950s strove to define themselves as workers and literature as a productive endeavor. The article then turns to Fatḥī Ghānim’s 1957 novel al-Jabal, arguing that its depiction of a failed peasant reform project is a means of reflecting on the work of the writer and its productive ends. While nominally committed to a progressive ethos of productivity, the novel remains haunted by the specter of labor with no product, exertion that produces nothing, which endures as an alternative model for literary writing.

Translating Orientalism. Louis-Mathieu Langlès as editor and translator of English literature between Oriental studies, commerce, and popularisation

This article delves into the translation and editing work of Louis-Mathieu Langlès (1764-1824), a significant figure in French Oriental studies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining Langlès’ translations of British literature about Asia, the analysis underscores two interrelated strategies shaping his work. The first strategy involved the dissemination of knowledge about Asia through translations shaped by both a literalist approach to the text and intensive editing practices. These practices resulted in the incorporation of extensive footnotes and additions that served both informative and domesticating functions and highlighted Langlès’ agency as a mediator of knowledge. The second strategy centres on Langlès’ reform project for the French system of teaching and learning Asiatic languages, resulting in the establishment of the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes in 1795. This strategy is strongly connected with his translation work as it reflects Langlès’ pragmatic vision of Oriental studies as based on the British example, particularly the scholarly activities of individuals working for the East India Company. His translations, therefore, were not mere acts of appropriation but both embodied and encouraged ‘emulation’, allowing us to reveal the interplay of scholarly admiration and political competition and to uncover a distinct strand of Anglophilia within the broader context of early French Oriental studies.

The Teaching Effect Evaluation of Big Data Analysis in Music Education Reform

At present, the evaluation of the implementation effect of the music teaching reform project is a hot topic. This project establishes a teaching reform implementation effect evaluation model based on improving the accuracy of teaching reform plan effectiveness evaluation. This project first analyzes the current research status of the impact evaluation of the implementation of music education reform projects and builds a set of evaluation systems. The evaluation method of teaching reform plan implementation effect based on a ”big data-driven - support vector machine” was constructed. The simulation experiment verifies that this method can evaluate the implementation of the teaching reform plan well. The relative error of the evaluation results is small. It is practical in improving the effectiveness evaluation of the teaching reform plan. After verification, it is found that the research results of this project are feasible.

Application of International Standards in Drafting Environmental Legislation and Law Reform Projects: The African Experience

Application of International Standards in Drafting Environmental Legislation and Law Reform Projects: The African Experience

Promises of Development, Land Acquisition, and Dispossession

This article examines how the futures promised by the postcolonial state through various projects leave peasants sceptical about a new government project at the rural margin of India. Focusing on a car factory project undertaken in 2006 by the government of the West Bengal Indian state, I explore how a half century-long project of land reforms shaped the dispossession politics of the peasants whose lands have been acquired for a car factory project. Based on an ethnography in Singur, this article explores how a car factory project at the very onset of its implementation instilled a sense of harm to life and livelihoods. Consequently, that project produced forms of spatiotemporal inequality between different socioeconomic groups in connection, not only with their ownership of land, but also with their respective vision of their work futures. Keywords: project form, dispossession, land acquisition, peasantry, India

“Curious Is as Curious Does”: Fostering Question-Asking in a Sino-Foreign Engineering School—A Case Study

Curiosity and question-asking are at the heart of science and engineering education. However, question-asking can be difficult for students due to several factors, including fear, language barriers, and cultural norms. This is especially true among Chinese students, who represent a growing number of upcoming engineers. To address this, in this case study from a university teaching reform project, we investigate the perceptions of curiosity and question-asking among Chinese science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate students following a newly developed semester-long project in a second-year communications course at a recently established Sino-foreign engineering school in China. In this period, students engaged in project-based learning centered around Nobel Prize-winning research, allowing them to explore the driving questions behind groundbreaking discoveries. Through a combination of qualitative analyses from students’ personal reflections as well as from a post-survey, the study examines students’ perceptions of curiosity and question-asking, the influence of gender on these skills, and the role of failure and perseverance in scientific inquiry. Findings indicate that the project increased students’ curiosity and improved their confidence in asking questions while providing insights into gender differences. Moreover, students were inspired by the curiosity of the Nobel Laureates, by the “simplicity” of the questions asked, and by the great importance of tenacity, passion, and learning from mistakes.

Five Years Later: Revisiting an Applied Calculus Reform Project and Its Impact on Subsequent Calculus Reforms, Pre- and Post-Pandemic

A project to reform the teaching of Applied Calculus at the University of North Dakota (UND) is revisited. The successes and failures and current status of the project are discussed. Both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic adjustments to the course structure are presented. The extension of the ideas used in the Applied Calculus course reform to update our mainstream Calculus courses is described. Diversity and equity considerations involved with these projects and future directions of these projects are addressed.

Reform proposal "Occasional surgical oncology" : Medical strategic analysis and ramifications of the draft bill within the framework of the Hospital Treatment Improvement Act (KHVVG) from the perspective of a university hospital

Cancer remains the second most common cause of death in Germany. Performance management and specialization concepts in medicine have the potential to positively influence the care and chances of survival of patients. From the perspective of the University Hospital Freiburg (UKF), the legislative initiative within the framework of the Hospital Treatment Improvement Act (KHVVG) results in anumber of medical strategic implications. This article explains and discusses the background, objectives and contents of the reform project "Occasional surgical oncology" and provides perspectives on strategic fields of action. Analysis and interpretation of the draft of the Act for improvement of the treatment quality in hospitals and on the reform of the remuneration structures (Federal Government draft act). From the point of view of the UKF hospitals should engage in cooperative discussions with neighboring hospitals at the earliest opportunity to shape regional healthcare with the goals of mapping the local allocation of oncology patients for optimal treatment, mitigating the loss of patients at affected locations and preparing for patient growth at facilities that will continue to provide treatment in surgical oncology. The ongoing legislative process and the fact that areliable analysis of relevant treatment areas will be possible for hospitals in the first half of 2025, presents particular challenges for hospitals and the strategic planning of activities. The gaps in the bill presented in this article should be urgently addressed to avoid undermining the project's goals and to support the hospitals remaining in the healthcare system in their preparations.

Leading program curriculum reform: reflections on challenges and successes

ABSTRACT Major curriculum review and redesign at the higher education level demand transformative academic leadership and significant time commitment. However, the traditional university culture characterised by change aversion, complex bureaucratic processes, and a research dominated academic workload allocation and promotion system poses significant obstacles to teaching quality enhancement. This article presents the critical reflections of a Program Director (academic middle leader) at an Australian university on the challenges and successes experienced while leading a major accounting curriculum reform project. Conducted between October 2019 and May 2021, this project encountered constant disruptions due to the Global Covid-19 pandemic, organisational restructuring, the new external professional accreditaiton requirements. Academic middle leader’s insights on the positive impacts and obstacles of major curriculum reform at the whole of a program level within a constantly evolving institutional environment provide valuable perspectives for both business education practice and policy reforms. The reflection has policy implications for university management to reassess strategic priorities with more balanced support for teaching and research in practice.

Framing Chinese Youth in the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution

Abstract The launching of the reform program in 1978 went hand in hand with praising Chinese youth as the vanguard of the new struggle for modernising China. Yet, the official rhetoric projected the ideal youth, while being at odds with the complex reality of the early post-Mao era, when the experience of the Cultural Revolution (CR) turned out to be the main reason for the so-called ‘youth problem’. Both international and Chinese literature have highlighted that in the reform era, youth, intended as a social and cultural category or construct, came to be associated with less positive values, and the traditional discourse of ‘youth as hope’ proliferated along and intertwined with a negative discourse of ‘youth as trouble’. This paper looks at the re-emergence of the Communist Youth League (CYL) as a key institutional actor in setting the stage for the construction of a new social discourse on youth in the transitional period 1978–1981, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership confronted with the need to deal with the tumultuous upheaval of the CR and its impact on youth on the one hand, and to push forward the reformist agenda on the other. By mainly relying on CYL sources (documents, internal publications and the official youth press), a part of which has been largely unexplored so far, it shows how the discourse on youth became complex and multifaceted in those historical circumstances, reflecting not just different views within the élite but also and most importantly the very tensions involved in the reform project. While the existence of the ‘youth problem’ led to establishing a causal nexus with the now condemned ultra-leftist tendencies associated with Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, the need to make sense of the complexity of youth boosted a heated debate on youth characteristics, with a number of cadres and adult experts affiliated to the CYL defining, describing and prescribing what Chinese youth were in ways that, by ensuring they had not been guilty as former Red Guards and recognising them as both victims and increasingly emancipated actors, eventually pushed forward a new idea of youth that conformed to the new modernization aims of the Party. Providing an assessment of the young generation and its inclinations in the aftermath of the CR eventually became the premise for facilitating the emergence of a new youth subjectivity, while envisioning the integration of the self within the broader collective and the coexistence of liberal values with traditional socialist ethics. The debate on youth characteristics reflected the complex changes taking place in China and was constitutive of a broader process that set the stage for rethinking the socialisation of youth in the post-Mao era.

Relational self and farmworker law reform: the case of Indonesia

This article celebrates and explores Keebet Benda-Beckmann’s important work on the centrality of “relationality” in legal pluralism, in Indonesia in particular, and more generally in the non-Western world. We aim to extend Benda-Beckmann’s argument on the centrality of relationality and legal pluralism into our analysis of an urgent project of Indonesian law reform: farmworker protection. We make an interpretive claim on the status of “relational self” as an organizing idea in the Indonesian legal consciousness. To build that interpretive claim, we provide qualitative context drawn from our field research in two farmworker communities in rural West Java, Indonesia. With the situation of Indonesian farmworkers as its case study, this paper presents how relational self-construal can be a starting point for the introduction of a greater access to justice. To build its argument, the paper first identifies relational self as the Indonesian farmworkers’ central notion of self. Ultimately, the paper develops a model of law reform proposal that takes relational self as its overarching supposition.

The Playhouse Effect: John Webster, Deixis and Story-Telling in the Theatres of Jacobean London

Unmarried mothers and children born out of wedlock are notoriously absent from the Carolean stage, which, on the other hand, saw an abundance of rakish gallants and prostitutes populating sexually charged plots. It is not a coincidence that the only two plays premiered between the 1660s and 1700 featuring an unmarried woman with a live child come up precisely with the arrival of William and Mary. This paper analyses the ways in which these plays—The Squire of Alsatia (1688) by Thomas Shadwell, and The Marriage-Hater Matched (1692) by Thomas Durfey—use the unmarried mother to convey a moral message that echoed William and Mary’s project of moral reform. However, these women are portrayed in radically different ways in both comedies. Although she takes a customary position of scorn in The Squire, the unmarried mother gets to be a good-hearted heroine that is eventually redeemed in The Marriage-Hater, a very challenging position for Durfey to portray which required of intra and extra textual devices to support her redemption without appearing to condone vice.

Blended Learning And Lab Reform: Self-Paced Sotl And Reflecting On Student Learning

As part of a large exercise physiology laboratory (lab) reform project, we used blended learning to support graduate teaching assistants and lab technicians in developing their pedagogical knowledge and create an entry point to reflective conversations about teaching and learning. Because self-paced asynchronous online modules can enable reflective and self-determined learning, this asynchronous professional development course is punctuated with reflective questions for the instructional team preparing to teach reformed exercise physiology labs. Asynchronous course content was shared via short videos, podcasts, and readings. We debriefed this self-paced, SoTL-informed course together, in-person. This social debriefing kicked off our weekly synchronous reflective conversations about teaching and learning in a community of practice. Developing a shared language for talking about teaching, enabling student learning, practicing effective teaching, and beginning to contemplate teaching philosophies were described by graduate teaching assistants as notable aspects of this blended learning journey. Lab technicians described discovering SoTL and discussing learning challenges as helpful to their teaching.

Cuando la ley se queda corta: constitucionalismo y “derechos fluviales”

Laws that recognise rivers and their ecosystems as legal persons or subjects with their own rights, duties and obligations have been associated with theories of environmental constitutionalism. However, the extent to, and manner in which, constitutional law (with its elevated status) has been instrumental in the conferral of these ‘riverine rights’ is still not well-understood. In this article, we consider the constitutional relevance of the recognition of rivers as legal persons or subjects in Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia and India. We argue that in these three countries riverine rights are constitutional experiments: as small-scale, ad hoc and ultimately incomplete attempts to transcend seemingly ineffective regulatory frameworks for rivers. However, they are also incremental, and influential, steps in a broader project of more fundamental social and environmental reform.

The impact of Learning from Country on teachers’ understandings of place and community: insights from the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project

AbstractIn this paper, we present findings from the Culturally Nourishing Schooling (CNS) project data, collected during and after a series of experiential and immersive Learning from Country (LFC) activities with teachers working in New South Wales (NSW) schools in Australia. LFC is positioned as the critical first step in the CNS whole-school reform project, which seeks to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ educational experiences and outcomes by developing teacher capacity to deliver culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogies. By centring Country and community, LFC, along with four other CNS strategies, encourages teachers to think, act and relate differently with respect to First Nations students, families, communities and the places and histories in which they are grounded. Drawing on Burgess et al.’s LFC framework, we found evidence of teachers: professing an ethical commitment to respecting and honouring local Aboriginal knowledges and knowledge holders; understanding the importance of connectedness and relational practices in their teaching; reflecting critically on their pre-existing ideas about Aboriginal students and communities and developing ‘place-consciousness’ or ‘Country consciousness’. We conclude that the LFC strategy is influencing the ways that teachers conceptualise and enact education in relation to Country and community, with the potential to deliver significant benefits to First Nations students, families and communities.

Learning in Lending: The World Bank’s Organisational Learning Journey in Albanian Health Financing Reform Projects, 1994–2022

Abstract Fostering a learning culture is crucial for aid and development organisations to address the complexities and uncertainties in their operating environments. This case study examines the World Bank’s learning processes in lending projects, focusing on the Albanian health financing reforms from 1994 to 2022. Using the Learning in Lending conceptual framework developed by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, the qualitative analysis of World Bank documents and reports offers valuable insights into the dynamics of learning processes in health projects. The findings illustrate a feedback loop process encompassing three distinct steps and reveal three types of learning: learning into lending, learning while lending, and learning from lending. By shedding light on the intricacies of the World Bank’s learning processes in health lending projects, this study not only deepens our understanding of how the organisation learns from its experience but also highlights the shortcomings and limitations of the process. Moreover, it emphasises the dual value of learning for multilateral and aid organisations, such as the World Bank, namely improving project results and addressing challenging developmental issues.

Bishops, Brothels and Byron: Hypocrisy and the 1844 Brothel Suppression Bill

The House of Lords debate over the 1844 Brothel Suppression Bill was derailed by an accusation of hypocrisy. An opponent of the measure, Earl Fitzhardinge, shifted attention from legal reform to the notorious brothels operating on Church of England property, and argued that the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey should be prosecuted were the bill to become law. In addition to offering an interesting case study of clerical hypocrisy in practice, the story of the failed 1844 Bill provides useful context for better-known sexual reform projects of the late nineteenth century. This article focuses on three major themes that animated the events of 1844: the power of distraction and delay; the role of elite male perspectives; and the complicated but critical role of Christianity in sexual reform.

The Legacy of M.M. Speransky in Modern Financial Law

The article is devoted to the study of the ideas of the famous statesman and public figure of the XIX century M.M. Speransky. His merits in the development of legal science and legal education in Russia are noted, as well as his achievements in the field of financial law are especially emphasized. The project of financial reforms prepared by M.M. Speransky, called the “Finance Plan”, is analysed. The economic situation that caused the financial transformations is considered, and the measures proposed by the great Russian reformer in the field of budget revenues and budget expenditures are examined in detail. The authors note the significant contribution of his idea to the formation of the principles of the budget system of Russia – the principle of budget balance, the principle of efficiency in the use of budget funds, the principles of budget independence and the delimitation of revenues, expenses and sources of financing budget deficits between the budgets of the budget system of the Russian Federation. The classification of budget expenditures proposed by M.M. Speransky for necessary, useful, excessive and excessive (useless) helps to reduce government costs and is very relevant for modern Russia. However, for its legislative consolidation, a clear system of criteria is required. It is also proposed to implement this idea by establishing the category of “priority expenses”, referring to them the so-called necessary expenses to be implemented in any state of affairs. The article indicates significant attention in the works of M.M. Speransky to the issues of proper order and the correct, transparent organization of a particular activity. It is also emphasized the relevance for the modern economy of Russia of its ideas on the reform of budget revenues, their unification, the consolidation of the principle of certainty of taxation and fees. The authors conclude that it is possible to further reform Russian financial legislation through the development of the ideas of M.M. Speransky.

Theoretical and practical exploration of work-based learning curriculum with a case study

This contribution reviews the development of vocational education and training (VET) curriculum development in the last two decades in China, which is categorised into three models: curriculum with theory and practice in parallel (TPP), curriculum with theory in the service of practice (TSP), and integrated curriculum between theory and practice (ITP). It describes briefly also a VET curriculum reform project that adopts a design-based research approach. The main objective of this project is to explore curriculum models that can more effectively promote the development of learners’ holistic professional competences. Result shows that the new work-based curriculum, especially ITP, plays a positive role in promoting the professional action competence of students. The new curriculum also has been welcomed by employers. Difficulties in implementation of new curriculum are teaching capability and work experience defect of teachers, and the lack of self-directed learning competence of some students. The key problem to be solved in the future is how to effectively identify the courses and learning contents through effective qualification research.