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The chapter discusses my response to the urgent need for a pedagogy that would effectively promote Israeli teachers’ meta-representational and particularly Visual Representational competencies in order to prepare new generations of school students to fully and successfully navigate the diverse, rich multimodal information that they encounter in the postmodern visual world. Currently, although VRs widely permeate school curricula, learners’ mass media sources for information gathering, and even matriculation testing, students’ meta-representational competence (MRC) are not intentionally developed to enable their dealing with visually transmitted information and their mindful manipulation of it for achieving their goals. VRs usages have been shown to be superficial, implicit, inadequate to utilize VRs’ potential for promoting knowledge acquisition and understanding, and even frequently erroneous. Following a short discussion of the constructs of Meta-Visual Representational Competencies and pedagogy, and potential institutional obstacles for introducing VRs, I propose core pedagogical guidelines for promoting such competencies in teachers, based on evidence collected continually over a decade of work with teachers at Haifa, Israel, while designing, developing, and refining this pedagogy in preservice teacher training and other programs at the University of Haifa and inservice frameworks. Each guideline is operationalized into tasks and activities designed for achieving its specific purpose, focusing on the application of these suggested guidelines in preservice teacher development program. The MRC-promoting pedagogy was designed and developed while keeping in mind the notion that a pedagogy should be flexible, adaptable to different instructional styles, goals, and contexts, and based on guidelines that are operationalized into detailed instructional plans for achieving specific goals, in accordance with teachers’ preferences.

Regionalism implying some form of city-region or metropolitan-level planning and governance has long been promoted for multiple reasons albeit with varied success. Experiencing a resurgence in 1990s, regional coordination and cooperation has proven effective in pursuing economic development and bolstering competitiveness. Unfortunately, other voices, such as those promoting regional scale land use planning and management to cultivate more sustainable urban form and settlement patterns became comparatively crowded out. With climate change-related environmental and ecological pressures mounting, the chapter suggests it is time to frame regions as socio-ecological rather than mere socio-economic spaces, thereby placing greater emphasis on ecosystems and ecological land management and a circular, regenerative economy. Using the city-region of Stuttgart (Germany) as exemplar, our contribution initiates an exploration into whether statutory regional planning in combination with various informal tools and a multi-level governance framework allows actors to begin to embed and implement these emerging ecological sustainability concepts.

Reference service of any type of library can be offered over the Internet in real-time that we meant here Virtual Reference Service or VRS, in short. Virtual reference service is an online and interactive text-based communication service through which it is possible to provide the reference service of a library or a group of libraries to their distant users using a set of modern communication-based technologies. This paper is based on the results of experimental research. It mainly focuses on the customization process of Zoho chat in the ABCD site module to provide a virtual reference service from the library website. There is very little research across the globe that addresses the implementation and customization process of chat-based widget embedded into web pages, which is a key-focusing area of the current study.

Washington's Statewide Virtual Reference (VRS) Project began in 2001, following some early adapters, but also at a time when most libraries and states still were considering the merits, possibilities, and pitfalls of the service. This chapter follows the development and implementation of a virtual reference (VR) service, along with support activities such as training, marketing, and assessment, in several collaborative library alliances across Washington State; describes unexpected opportunities, and plans for future sustainability. It ends with an analysis of experiences, successes, and failures, along with plans for the future based on the many things that were learned.

In China, more than 80,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than 3,000 people have lost their lives. It seems that there will be more deaths since the epidemic is not over. All the Chinese provinces have reported the COVID-19 cases. This chapter aims to explore the trend of COVID-19 treatment efficiency in Chinese provinces using the data released daily by China Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Since China Center for Disease Control and Prevention began to release data daily from January 24 to March 12, we have more than 40 groups of daily data for 31 provinces in China mainland. In the calculation, we take the daily data of each province as a sample and then we have more than 1,200 samples in this study.

We use additive two-stage data envelopment analysis as an efficiency evaluation tool to calculate the COVID-19 treatment efficiency. In our framework, the first stage is to understand the infection rate and the second stage is to evaluate the treatment efficiency. In the first stage for the tth day, we use total population (p) and number of people infected in the previous day (inf _t−1) as the inputs and cumulative number of people infected in the current day (inf _t ) as the output. In the second stage for the tth day, we use cumulative number of people infected in the current day (inf _t ) as the input and cumulative death in the current day (death _t ) and cumulative recovery in the current day (recov _t ) as the outputs. Some techniques on how to deal with undesirable outputs such as inf _t and death _t are employed in this study.

After we have the infection rate and treatment efficiency for the samples more than 1,200, we analyze the COVID-19 treatment efficiency and its development trend from January 24 to March 12 in 34 regions of China from static and dynamic aspects. The results show that, on the whole, the overall efficiency and phased efficiency of COVID-19 treatment efficiency in all regions of China are relatively high, which reflects the key factor for the Chinese government to quickly control the epidemic in the short term. Relatively speaking, the average efficiency value in the infection stage (first stage) is lower than the average efficiency value in the healing stage (second stage), which shows that the focus of anti-epidemic in China should be early detection and prevention rather than treatment process. In terms of trend, the total efficiency of COVID-19 treatment in each region shows a trend of “increasing first and then decreasing.” Our analysis indicates that in the initial stage, the continuous increase of various resources leads to the rise of the total efficiency, while in the later stage, the rapid decline of the number of infected people leads to the decrease of the total efficiency. Based on the results of the efficiency analysis, this study provides corresponding management implications and policy suggestions, hoping to provide some enlightenment and suggestions for the anti-epidemic work of other countries in the severe environment where the epidemic is spreading rapidly.

In contrast to the available literature which uses common frontier for efficiency measurement of Indian secondary education (ISE) with state level data, output-oriented technical efficiency (OUTTE) of Indian states and union territories (UT) is estimated to find whether maximum possible output of ISE given the resources are being generated, by creating two separate frontiers for (i) General Category States (GCS) and (ii) Special Category States (SCS) and UT, as two groups operate under different economic and fiscal conditions, for 2010–2011 to 2015–2016 under variable returns to scale and using non-parametric Data Envelopment Approach. Not all GCS and SCS&UT are perfectly technically efficient, implying GCS/SCS can increase output of ISE given the existing inputs. OUTTE of ISE varies within and between GCS/SCS. A second step determinant analysis suggests both for GCS and SCS, OUTTE is related positively to (i) percentage of girls to boy’s enrollment in ISE, supporting the positive role of gender equality in education regarding enrollment; and (ii) ratio of government education expenditure to aggregate government expenditure and negatively to poor infrastructural variables. OUTTE is also positively related to per capita net state domestic product at factor cost (constant prices), proportion of para-teachers for GCS and percentage of ST enrollment for SCS.

This chapter measures total factor productivity growth (TFPG) using Malmquist productivity index (MPI) and the growth of MPI of Indian Textile Industry employing nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA), during 1995–2016, exploring company (firm) level Center for Monitoring of Indian Economy (CMIE) Prowess data; examines whether TFPG has improved after the withdrawal of multifiber trade agreement (MFA) since 2005; decomposes TFPG into technical change (TC), technical efficiency change (TEC), and scale efficiency change (SEC); and explains the factors behind the movement of TFPG, considering the effect of R&D (RD), exports (EX), marketing expenditures (MKTs) advertisement expenditures (ADVs), imports (IMP), using second-stage panel regression. Empirical evidence supports fluctuating pattern of TFPG during 1995–2016, with a marginal declining tendency. TFPG has increased in 1999–2000, 2000–01, 2009–10, and 2012–13. After dismantling MFA, MPI level has significantly declined, with an increase in its growth rate, but the increase is not statistically significant. The effect of EX, RD, ADV are nonlinear, U-shaped, and IMP and MKT are inverted U-shaped, implying that the sign effect of any variable depends on its size. There are joint interaction effects of (a) RD and EX; RD and MKT which are positive, (b) ADV and MKT as represented by the ratio (ADV/MKT), having nonlinear inverted U-shaped relation. The joint interaction effect supports that the impact of one variable depends on the magnitude of other. The marginal effect of EX, IMP, and ADV are positive; increase in these variables promotes TFPG. The greater role of ADV over MKT is evident. The marginal effect of RD is negative; the average level of RD is too low to generate positive effects, and, thus, there is an urgency of increasing RD. The promising part of the decomposition analysis is that highest contribution to growth rate of TFPG is the growth rate of TEC followed by growth rate of TC, and thus by increasing TEC and TC, higher growth rate of TFPG is achieved and may be beneficial in the long run and may lead to absorption of economic shocks for an economy facing recession in its output growth. Some policy suggestions are made for boosting up TFPG.