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The purpose of this paper is to use a descriptive case study to establish how collaboration, innovation and knowledge‐management strategies have scaled‐up learning and development in rural, remote and other resource‐constrained Canadian delivery settings.

Intervention design was realized through a one‐time, collaborative, national capacity‐building project. A project portfolio of 72 sub‐projects, initiatives and strategic activities was used to improve access, enhance quality and create capacity for palliative and end‐of‐life care services. Evaluation was multifaceted, including participatory action research, variance analysis and impact analysis. This has been supplemented by post‐intervention critical reflection and integration of relevant literature.

The purposeful use of collaboration, innovation and knowledge‐management strategies have been successfully used to support a rapid scaling‐up of learning and development interventions. This has enabled enhanced and new pan‐Canadian health delivery capacity implemented at the local service delivery catchment‐level.

The intervention is bounded by a Canada‐specific socio‐cultural/political context. Design variables and antecedent conditions may not be present and/or readily replicated in other nation‐state contexts. The findings suggest opportunities for future integrative and applied health services and policy research, including collaborative inquiry that weaves together concepts from adult learning, social science and industrial engineering.

Scaling‐up for new capacity is ideally approached as a holistic, multi‐faceted process which considers the total assets within delivery systems, service catchments and communities as potentially being engaged and deployed.

The Pallium Integrated Capacity‐building Initiative offers model elements useful to others seeking theory‐informed practices to rapidly and effectively scale‐up learning and development efforts.

While it is recognised that the involvement of children in sustainable tourism change and development is crucial the fact remains that information on their worldviews and sustainable tourism behaviour is scarcely available. One long-term empowerment strategy countries and governments around the world can implement is by promoting children's rights through responsible education. This chapter articulates one tactic of that strategy at the local action level of school excursions, which is seen as an instrument that can be made most effective when it is initiated with the assumption that it is needed to help our younger generation acquire an environmental worldview, is harnessed in coalition with collaborators and, applied around the ‘moral’ obligation of educational institutions to provide agency to students' voice. Of the 17 Goals of Sustainable Development, SDG4 (Quality) Education can make a critically important contribution to progress. A series of activities and initiatives undertaken in informal educational environments such as field trips and school excursions can contribute to educating children, building their awareness about responsible and sustainable tourism practices, and developing an environmental sensitivity. Excursion activities and destinations such as museum exhibits have the opportunity to shape identities—through access to objects, information and knowledge. Visitors can see themselves and their culture reflected in ways that encourage new connections, meaning making and learning. Upon looking into transformational experiences in museums it was found that students were easily able to articulate that ‘aha’ moment, particularly around thinking differently about issues and taking action for environmental and sustainable changes.

This chapter focuses on growing professionally and encouraging peers' skills. The author opens by relating her experience in initiating and implementing museum-integrated instruction as a curricular program at all grade levels. She discusses the steps involved in creating one of the nation's first Museum Magnet Schools, from introducing the idea to her school and district to managing all the logistics needed to support it: funding, partnerships, professional development, curriculum writing, and partnerships. Strategically working with teachers, administrators, and organizations builds upon foundations in pedagogy and curriculum and reduces barriers to implementation. The chapter outlines effective strategies for building a dedicated team of faculty and administrators within your school, using professional development and encouragement to gain “buy-in” for projects such as school and student exhibitions. Such activities change the school culture in positive ways, with teachers becoming “ambassadors” to parents, professional learning communities, and other education stakeholders. Harnessing the power of connections to grow as a professional and growing communities of expertise cultivates performance pedagogy and brings history alive for students. By networking with experts from museums and historic sites, educators can tap into museum techniques such as exhibition design and object-based inquiry, which can be powerful tools for experiential learning. The chapter also contains outreach strategies for effectively presenting such initiatives at professional conferences and employing the power of social media through blogging and Twitter. As the author notes based on a decade of experience, the potential for student engagement from museum-related strategies is a persuasive argument for educators and administrators to collaborate in adapting them.

This paper sets out to report on research by the authors into the development and application of four extensions to Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (LoRV) that increase its utility in the arena of unplanned changes in hegemonic control of designed complex socio‐technical systems/digital eco‐systems in the built environment that are structurally dynamic or emergent.

Research on which the paper is based focused on exploration of classical systems approaches to the design of complex socio‐technical systems in which ownership, power, control and management of structure and benefit generation and distribution are distributed, dynamic and multi‐constituent. Support for development of these four extensions to Ashby's Law comes from observation of four decades of socio‐technical systems development along with critical thinking that combined systems analysis theories with theories and findings from fields of hegemonic analysis, design research, management, management information systems, behaviour in organisations and sociology.

The paper outlines application of four new extensions to LoRV in relation to unplanned changes in distributions of power, ownership, control, benefit generation and benefit distribution in complex socio‐technical systems/digital eco‐systems in the built environment that are emergent or have changing structures. Three of these extensions have been outlined earlier in relation to the design of learning object‐based e‐learning systems. The fourth extension builds on these via application of Coasian analysis. The paper also describes a suite of five guidelines to assist with the design of complex socio‐technical systems derived from the four extensions to Ashby.

The four extensions of Ashby's Law that underpin the design guidelines in this paper are deduced from observation and critical analysis rather than being “proven” empirically. They are derived from observation of the behaviour of real‐world complex systems together with critical analytical thinking that integrated theory and research findings from a range of disciplines where each informs understanding of hegemonic aspects of emergent complex socio‐technical systems involving multiple, changing constituencies, and evolving system structures.

A design method is derived comprising five design guidelines for use in pre‐design and design of complex socio‐technical systems/digital eco‐systems in the built environment.

The paper describes the application of four new extensions to LoRV that extend the analytical role of Ashby's Law in diagnosis of changes in power relations and unintended design outcomes from changes in the generation and control of variety in complex, multi‐layered and hierarchical socio‐technical systems that have multiple stakeholders and constituencies. From these, a suite of five new design guidelines is proposed.

Presently, searching the internet for learning material relevant to ones own interest continues to be a time‐consuming task. Systems that can suggest learning material (learning objects) to a learner would reduce time spent searching for material, and enable the learner to spend more time for actual learning. The purpose of this paper is to present a system of “hybrid search and delivery of learning objects to learners”.

This paper presents a system of “hybrid search and delivery of learning objects to learners” that combines the use of WordNet for semantic query expansion and an approach to personalized learning object delivery by suggesting relevant learning objects based on attributes specified in the learner's profile. The learning objects are related to the learner's attributes using the IEEE LOM and IMS LIP standards. The system includes a web crawler to collect learning objects from existing learning object repositories, such as NEEDS or SMETE.

The presented HSDLO system has the ability to accurately search and deliver learning objects of interest to a learner as well as adjust the learner's profile over time by evaluating the learner's preferences implicitly through the learning object selections.

Since real LOM's from SMETE are not much populated, the system is tested with a limited set of attributes. The system is evaluated using a test bench rather than real learners.

The paper proposes a combination of three search techniques in one system as well an architectural solution which can be used for other types of online search engines.

This paper aims to examine the impact of using digitized objects for inquiry with middle-school classrooms. Research analyzed critical thinking processes and student engagement during collaborative investigations with 3D models of authentic objects.

Digitized objects were 3D scans of fossils from the paleontology collection at the Natural History Museum of Utah implemented as 3D prints and 3D virtual models. Verbal protocol analysis examined critical thinking processes during collaborative student learning. Engagement was assessed via student feedback and a classroom observation protocol.

The findings demonstrated that digitized objects facilitated key critical thinking processes, particularly observation, problem finding, elaboration and evaluation. Student feedback was very positive and focused on strong interest in 3D technologies and the ability to engage in authentic exploration. Observations showed very high levels of on-task engagement.

Additional research is necessary to determine if findings generalize across varied learner populations, including broader age ranges and socioeconomic samples, to activities implemented as fully online experiences and to digitized objects from varied domains.

Findings demonstrate digitized objects are effective methods to engage students in critical thinking and to promote engagement with authentic objects during classroom learning. Results demonstrate strong potential of new technologies to leverage the educational impact of digitized objects from local collections, setting the stage for expanded educational outreach by museums and libraries.

Learning Chinese is unquestionably very important and popular worldwide with the fast economic growth of China. To most foreigners and also local students, one of the major challenges in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences that are considered as significant in the Chinese culture. However, due to the potentially complicated structures of Chinese characters together with their stroke sequences, there are very few character recognition techniques that can effectively tackle the involved training task in an efficient and flexible manner. The purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent and flexible e‐learning software based on learning objects to facilitate the learning of writing Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences.

The paper adopts an incremental approach in designing the overall system architecture to emphasize on extendibility of the system. The basic features of the system including the evolution and pronunciation of each Chinese character can be embedded as a part of the learning object metadata to enhance students' understanding of Chinese characters. To demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal, a prototype of the proposed e‐learning software was built on smartphones such that students can learn anytime and anywhere.

From the empirical evaluation of the e‐learning prototype for learning to write correct Chinese characters on mobile devices, it was found that foreign students can learn and practise the writing more effectively anytime and anywhere on their mobile devices after classes. Some initial positive feedback was collected. Furthermore, a more careful and thorough evaluation is planned to be conducted in relevant courses for foreign students in the upcoming Fall semester.

This proposal represents the first attempt to reduce the complexity while increasing the extendibility of the e‐learning software to learn Chinese through learning objects running on smartphones or mobile devices in general. More importantly, it opens up numerous opportunities for further investigations including possible integrations with other existing Chinese e‐learning systems.

Contends that effective e‐learning requires that the education content be written and delivered very differently than in the past. Proposes to cut through the complexity associated with adopting an e‐learning approach by highlighting 13 key questions that need to be asked in assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and applicability of different e‐learning offerings. Asserts that when properly answered, the 13 questions provide a solid basis for evaluating on‐line learning and education products, and for positioning a company’s approach to e‐learning with an eye on the future instead of the past. Includes definitions that illustrate how e‐learning products are evolving.

Written by a librarian and history professor, the purpose of this paper is to describe a collaborative, primary source literacy project and report its effectiveness in teaching undergraduates to critically analyze information and develop primary source literacy.

The methodology used included a research project with 24 undergraduates and a pre- and post-survey. The research project and student survey incorporated principles from the “Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy”, published in 2017 by the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section and the Society of American Archivists. The paper offers research and practical implications for librarians and instructors interested in strategies to teach information literacy. For instance, the paper includes a review of literature on “archival intelligence” or “primary source literacy” and describes the 2017 Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy.

Socially, the paper includes implications for how to create an inclusive learning experience for students with mechanisms such as a scaffolded assignment, hands-on instruction, imposter syndrome awareness and a no-Google policy.

Given that this is one of the first articles to document how practitioners are incorporating the new 2017 Guidelines, this is sure to be an original and valuable essay.