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In this paper, the authors aim to propose a method for learning robotic assembly sequences, where precedence constraints and object relative size and location constraints can be learned by demonstration and autonomous robot exploration.

To successfully plan the operations involved in assembly tasks, the planner needs to know the constraints of the desired task. In this paper, the authors propose a methodology for learning such constraints by demonstration and autonomous exploration. The learning of precedence constraints and object relative size and location constraints, which are needed to construct a planner for automated assembly, were investigated. In the developed system, the learning of symbolic constraints is integrated with low-level control algorithms, which is essential to enable active robot learning.

The authors demonstrated that the proposed reasoning algorithms can be used to learn previously unknown assembly constraints that are needed to implement a planner for automated assembly. Cranfield benchmark, which is a standardized benchmark for testing algorithms for robot assembly, was used to evaluate the proposed approaches. The authors evaluated the learning performance both in simulation and on a real robot.

The authors' approach reduces the amount of programming that is needed to set up new assembly cells and consequently the overall set up time when new products are introduced into the workcell.

In this paper, the authors propose a new approach for learning assembly constraints based on programming by demonstration and active robot exploration to reduce the computational complexity of the underlying search problems. The authors developed algorithms for success/failure detection of assembly operations based on the comparison of expected signals (forces and torques, positions and orientations of the assembly parts) with the actual signals sensed by a robot. In this manner, all precedence and object size and location constraints can be learned, thereby providing the necessary input for the optimal planning of the entire assembly process.

This chapter reviews the strategies, methods, and techniques used in this system of curriculum design to configure effective curricula, which translate the content and structure of a discipline into credible and trustworthy techniques of curriculum design. The impact of these design strategies is discussed as a method to facilitate, promote, and enhance learning through a differentiated design of the curriculum in any discipline.

The systematic design of curriculum presented in this text seeks to provide order and accessibility to the intended learning. The systematic configuration of the dimensions of the curriculum by adapting frameworks from the best evidence of how humans learn as codified in the theories of learning, instruction, and environmental influences achieves this goal. This approach removes the intellectual, psychological, and sociologic impediments to learning so that learners can achieve the intended goals without having to decipher the intended learning, reconcile differences between the articulated learning and the learning strategies, and overcome the social constraints imposed by a dissonant or hostile learning environment. The goal of a curriculum in this process is to structure, facilitate, and support the learning experience through evidence-based curriculum design.

The theories adapted as design templates represent the collective intelligence of the profession and the differences in perspective affirmatively differentiate the structure and processes of learning to configure the dimensions of a curriculum to align with the intellectual structure of the discipline (Gardner, 1999). This deliberate and disciplined configuration of the curricular dimensions strives to develop an “ideal” curriculum, which optimizes engagement with learning to ensure intellectual accessibility, promotes learning achievement through effective instructional processes, and enhances the learning performance of the learner by capitalizing on the drivers and constraints to learning generated by the structure of the learning environment. Collectively, these strategies seek to align the psychophysics of the human learning process with the structure and intended learning of each discipline.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new method for solving parametric programming problems; a new scheme of constraints fuzzification. In the proposed approach, constraints are learned based on deductive learning.

Adaptive neural‐fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is used for constraint learning by generating input and output membership functions and suitable fuzzy rules.

The experimental results show the ability of the proposed approach to model the set of constraints and solve parametric programming. Some notes in the proposed method are clustering of similar constraints, constraints generalization and converting crisp set of constraints to a trained system with fuzzy output. Finally, this idea for modeling of constraint in the support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used and shows that this approach can obtain a soft margin in the SVM.

Properties of the new scheme such as global view of constraints, constraints generalization, clustering of similar constraints, creation of real fuzzy constraints, study of constraint strength and increasing the degree of importance to constraints are different aspects of the proposed method.

Business schools have been under fire for their alleged inefficacy in developing students’ managerial skills in MBA programs. On the basis of extant learning theories, the purpose of this paper is to propose a reconsideration of learning goals and assessment procedures for managerial skill development within MBA education.

The authors review the literatures on stage, experiential, social, and action learning theories to identify pedagogical suggestions for optimal skill development and to highlight the constraints program administrators and teachers face in efforts to advance students’ acquisition of complex managerial skills in MBA classrooms.

Conceptually, the authors argue that an emphasis on mastering complex managerial skills – as an expected learning outcome – might be an overly ambitious goal that can lead to neglecting early attainments in skill acquisition and create false impressions of MBA program failure. Furthermore, the authors discuss how MBA programs could consider the use of newer evaluation procedures for evaluating skill development.

The paper calls for greater attention to intermediate stages of managerial skill development for establishing learning goals, the consideration of knowledge structures for assessing the degree of skill development, and a focus on managerial skill development as a life‐long process.

The aim of this article is to offer a conceptual framework in entrepreneurship education largely inspired by education sciences and discuss its two main levels, the ontological and educational levels. This framework is then used to discuss various types of entrepreneurship teaching programs, focusing on three broad categories of learning processes.

This article uses intensive reviews of literature in the fields of education and entrepreneurship. The teaching framework and the derived propositions are intended to provide a bridge between education sciences and the field of entrepreneurship and seeks to stress the scientific legitimacy of entrepreneurship education.

Finds that there is a need to reconsider entrepreneurship education in its wide diversity, both from an ontological and pedagogical point‐of‐view. The range of theoretical choices, objectives, publics, pedagogical methods and institutional context should be approached through the lenses of multiple teaching models and learning processes, which can be structured around a general framework.

The framework allows for the combination of both the concept of teaching models and learning process in a general theory‐driven framework and their applicability to specific entrepreneurship education situations.

The authors' contribution sheds a new light, both on the design and on the implementation of entrepreneurship teaching programs. An explicit conceptual framework should help the effective and systematic design, management and evaluation of new or existing programs, along all the relevant dimensions.

The authors propose a conceptual framework, a canonic teaching model, in entrepreneurship education.

The process of differentiating each of the dimensions of learning is demonstrated by the application of three possible conceptual frameworks for each dimension, which are based on the theories of learning, instruction, and environment. Multiple existing theories apply to each dimension of the curriculum, including one framework that is a synthesis of several related theories. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories may be adapted into design templates and used to configure the components of the curriculum. The outcome of this process is to create coherent curricula through the practical application of theories of learning as design templates.

A blueprint template is presented to visualize the internal alignment, interconnectedness, and overall coherence of each curriculum. This template visually depicts the functional interactions between the curricular components as dynamic relationships. This tool reveals the design relationships within the curriculum for purposes of design and evaluation. For curriculum design purposes, this form is used to establish and maintain the alignment among the dimensions of a curriculum (horizontally in the template) as well as the interconnectedness of the components. Engagement with the learning process begins by translating the content of each learning objective into instructional objectives, which aligns the instructional components with each learning objective. The instructional objectives are configured to align the content and structure contained in the outcomes and objectives with the instructional components. In this curriculum design system, the instructional taxonomies of Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl (1956) are adapted as design templates to demonstrate three strategies to configure the structure of the learning engagement dimension into three distinct purposes of developing cognition, skills, or values within each dimension (vertically in the template).

The learning experience in this curriculum demonstration differentiates three distinct instructional functions: the learning of thinking skills, the learning of performance skills, and the learning of values-based performance. A template adapted from credible theories of instruction configures the specified learning.

Three models also differentiate the learning environment dimension of a curriculum. The learning environment is structured to deliver learning through individual, cooperative, or collaborative processes. Although the environmental considerations mostly impact the activities through which learners interact with the content of the curriculum (reinforcement activities, assignments, assessments), the environmental factors influence all components of the curriculum and can be differentiated to promote and enhance learning. From the learner perspective, the learning environment is created by the dynamic interaction of all components of the curriculum to facilitate an unobstructed path to learning.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

This paper aims to explore how making tabletop board games elicited adolescents’ design thinking during their participation in a summer game design camp at their local library.

This study leverages qualitative approaches to coding transcripts of participants’ talk. This study uses the design thinking framework from the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University as provisional codes to identify and make sense of participants’ verbalized design activity.

This study found that the making context of designing tabletop board games elicited a high frequency of design talk in participants, evidenced by both quantitative and qualitative reports of the data. Additionally, participants in large measure obviated constraints on their design activity imposed by linear conceptions of the design thinking model this study introduces, instead of moving fluidly across design modes. Finally, participants’ prior experiences in both life and in regard to games significantly influenced their design study.

This study highlights the unique affordances of making-centric approaches to designing tabletop games in particular, such as participants’ quick and sustained engagement in the study of design. This study also highlights the need for conceptions of design thinking specific to designing games.

Organizational change seldom occurs as swiftly or as dramatically as one might imagine, the contrasts between old and new organizational paradigms are often just as striking as our most outrageous dreams. Describes two different and contrasting contexts or ways of viewing or thinking about people and life. Recommends breaking out of old models of organizing people to work and creating new paradigms by discovering flexible new ways of “seeing” the world ‐ in the sense of perceiving, understanding, interpreting and organizing with people to achieve a common purpose.

The chapters in this book focus on three key areas of innovation in teaching and learning in higher education today: smartphone devices, texting applications, and multipurpose, multimedia mobile communicative applications such as Skype. Today's educators have at their disposal a wide array of digital technologies that enable them to enhance the teaching and learning process. These technologies, coupled with more valid and reliable learning theories, are revolutionizing the way we teach and are altering our notions of what it means to learn and live in a post-industrial, globalized world. Both individually and socially, these new mobile technologies are becoming increasingly popular and useful as educational tools across a wide range of disciplines as a means to engage and retain students. If used appropriately and purposefully, these mobile technologies are well suited for the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world we live in and they provide educators with another set of tools by which to enrich the teaching and learning process and educational outcomes (Kukulska-Hulme, 2012).