Search results

Prior research suggests that collaboration is key to sustainable community development and environmental management, and peer-to-peer learning (P2PL) may facilitate community building and collaborative learning skills. This study aims to examine the effect of P2PL on the enhancement of environmental management and sustainable development skills, community building and social capital (i.e. connectedness) and understanding of course learning objectives.

Quantitative and qualitative longitudinal survey data was collected in a sustainable development focused course offered at a large American public university that uses P2PL to explicitly facilitate community building and collaborative skills. Safety precautions and changing locational course offerings due to the COVID-19 pandemic in years 2020, 2021 and 2022 provided an opportunity to evaluate the impact of P2PL on these skills during both virtual and in-person formats. Additionally, this study compared in-course student evaluations with students taking other sustainable development-related courses with collaborative learning aspects to understand the wider effectiveness of this course structure.

This study finds that course format (virtual vs in-person) overall made no difference in either connectedness or conceptual understandings, and that students in both formats felt more connected to others than students taking other courses with P2PL. Scaffolding P2PL and supplemental peer support can yield improved connectedness and learning among students taking environmental coursework.

Sustainable development requires group collaboration and partnership building skills. Issues are consistently raised about the challenges to teaching these skills in higher education. The students and instructors in this research study identify P2PL strategies to address these challenges for in-person and virtual classroom settings.

Placement accuracy in automated production equipment has been a problem since the first automated machine assembled a product on a manufacturing line at the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the demand for machine accuracy has steadily increased since. Adept Technology, Inc. has developed an accuracy enabling software and hardware system called the High Accuracy Position System (HPS). Adept introduced the first generation of HPS in 1984, for precision assembly of through‐hole components on printed circuit boards. The HPS system provides a method whereby a robot accuracy map, a database of positional errors, is determined in the region of the assembly process. This accuracy map then provides a data resource to offset the computed assembly locations during production and compensates appropriately for any imperfections in the physical mechanism. The HPS system also includes thermal and backlash compensation to account for some of the largest error producing factors in the system.

Steve Brown's article, “Microcomputers in the School Office: The Example of Springfield School District and a Survey of OSSC Members,” OSSC Bulletin, Vol. 28, no. 5 (January 1985), tells how Springfield School District automated their school office by buying an OCLC M300 Workstation for their school library, using the extra time and capabilities of the Workstation for other activities. OSSC Bulletin (OCLC ♯2153848) is a publication of the Eugene, OR, Oregon School Study Council.