Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study examines organizational learning (OL) with member organizations of a state association for children and family services. OL has been studied in business organizations, but the concept has value in the context of Human Service Organizations (HSOs) as well. HSOs face increasing demands for accountability through evaluating outcomes, requiring new organizational skills and activities. The state association has collected outcome data from member organizations for nine years, and has recently provided external consultants to help organizations interpret and make use of the information to improve organizational functioning. The process of OL was measured pre- and post-external consultation using an OL questionnaire developed by Templeton, Lewis, and Snyder (2002). Sixty-two member agencies received questionnaires and 42 responded for a response rate of 67%. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 CEOs/Executive Directors of HSOs. The OL questionnaire was found to have sufficient reliability and validity for the sample of HSOs in the study. Two factors were identified through factor analyses, Organizational Culture and Environmental Awareness. Satisfaction with an external consultant was not found to be related to increased OL. In the qualitative findings, the origins of learning themes that were identified were External Pressures, Philosophy, Planning, and Financial Pressures. The facilitating factor themes identified were Leadership, Philosophy, New Staff/New Leadership, Willingness, Planning, and Training. The perceived obstacles to OL were Resistance, Philosophy, Finances, and Time. External consultants were found to contribute to Evaluation, Awareness, Motivation, and Training. The main practice implication of the study is the identification of an instrument that may be used to examine OL in HSOs. The identification of facilitating factors and factors that may impede OL is a valuable contribution, as is the use of a standard definition of OL. The educational implications are for awareness in the education of future leaders by introducing OL and the application to HSOs. Future research is needed to address the development or modification of a better matched instrument for use with HSOs.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In the fields of formal and informal online adult education, the absence of a social context for instruction has been found to present significant limitations for learner persistence and retention. In the field of online psychoeducational intervention, self-administered and self-paced individualized prevention programs have been developed for delivery to large populations of anonymous users. These delivery models provide limited social context for instructional activities, due in part to the anonymity of their participants. When social interaction is included in their prevention programs through voluntary, asynchronous self-help/mutual aid discussion forums, anonymity may still limit social interaction, in favor of observational learning advantages for self-efficacy appraisals derived from "lurking". When these large-group models have been applied to online psychoeducation intervention programs for the purposes of encouraging mutual aid, interactive participation has been limited. This mixed methods study focused on a model for the design of an online small group psychoeducational intervention that integrated individual and social learning in a parent management training program. Self-paced participation was replaced with facilitator-led participation in an asynchronous discussion forum where topics were prioritized and sequenced with learning content from individual web-based training modules. Social interaction was facilitated through online problem-based learning discussion group. Despite assertions that interactive participation in online psychoeducational discussion forums may only be accomplished once a subscriber threshold of several hundred participants has been reached, this study found that small group participation through the program's integrated design resulted large effects for increases in parent self-agency and reduction of over-reactive, coercive parenting behaviors. Participation in the online problem-based group discussion forum was found to have contributed to participant outcomes when posting characteristics revealed the presence of both mutual aid processes and the application of individual learning module content.

This study is an exploration of contextual environmental learning through integrated life skills and literacy in a Foundation Phase classroom. It attempts to document, explore and clarify some of the challenges of situated environmental learning in a Foundation Phase classroom through an integrated program of life skills learning and literacy acquisition. The research draws on a rich but often overlooked cultural historical context of embodied intergenerational healthy living practices in a rural Eastern Cape context to construct a learning platform for a more carefully situated and potentially relevant education. The integrated life skills and literacy acquisition program thus unfolded as a contextual process of situated learning within a developing blend of listening, writing and reading to learn in a Grade 3 program of additive bilingualism. The data generated in the study and represented in Chapter 4 suggests curriculum contextualisation in an integrated Foundation Phase program can contribute to environmental learning with enhanced relevance and literacy skills. The evidence from working with learner knowledge and experience in a community context appears to be a key to meaningful curriculum contextualization in an integrated Foundation Phase programme producing enhanced literacy and relevance. It was noted that engaging elders (gogos) enabled the process of opening up local knowledge to link with learner experience and school knowledge to foster relevance, appeared to contribute to more meaningful learning across other learning areas. There is evidence that acquiring literacy skills is a lengthy process that is supported by learner interest and the relevance of what they are learning especially when it is acknowledged by the teacher and the community. The findings of an exploratory study such as this cannot be conclusive beyond the experience that I had of working with learners who were engaged in learning as well as acquiring literacy skills literacy skills. My personal enthusiasm and work with the Gogos and with a community focus were key factors that strengthened environmental learning across school, home and community. The experience has convinced me that this is the way we must work to enhance relevance and literacy in our Foundation Phase teaching.

Das Jahrbuch der TU Chemnitz erscheint einmal jährlich und gibt einen Rück- und Ausblick auf die Entwicklung der Universität. / The yearbook of TU Chemnitz is published once a year and gives retrospect and perspective of the development of the university.

This is a study on the nature of learning, particularly the emergence of active learning processes in the case of an environmental education teacher professional development programme – the Eastern Cape Border-Kei cohort of the 2008 Schools and Sustainability Course. This was a part-time, one-year course supporting teachers to qualify, strengthen and deepen opportunities for environmental learning in the South African curriculum. An active learning framework (O’Donoghue, 2001) promoting teaching and learning with information, enquiry, action and reporting/reflection dimensions was integrated into the Schools and Sustainability course design to support these environmental learning opportunities. In this study, the notion of active learning is elaborated as a situated, action-oriented, deliberative and co-engaged approach to teaching and learning, and related to Bhaskar’s (1993) notion of transformative praxis. The study used a nested case study design, considering the case of six Foundation Phase teachers in six primary schools within the Border-Kei Schools and Sustainability cohort. Interviews, observations (of workshops and lesson plan implementation in classrooms) and document review of teacher portfolios (detailing course activities, lesson plans, learners’ work and learning and teaching support materials) were used to generate the bulk of the data. A critical realist theory underpinning the methodology enables a view of agency as emergent from social structures and mechanisms as elaborated in Archer’s (1998b) model of morphogenesis and Bhaskar’s (1993) model of four-planar being. The critical realist methodology also enables a view of emergent active learning processes as open-ended, responsive to particular potential, but dependent on contingencies (such as learning and teaching support materials, tools and methodologies). The analysis of emergent active learning processes focuses particularly on Bhaskar’s (1993) ontological-axiological chain (MELD schema) as a tool for analysing change. The MELD schema highlights1M ontological questions of what is (with emphasis on structures and generative mechanisms) and what could be (real, but non-actualised possibilities). It enables reflection on what mediating and interactive agential processes either reproduce what is or have the potential to transform what is to what could be (2E). Thirdly, the MELD schema enables reflection on what should be – this is the 3L “axiological moment” (Bhaskar, 1993: 9) where questions of values and ethics in relation to the holistic whole are raised. Finally, the schema raises questions (4D) of what can be, with ontologically grounded, context-sensitive and expressively veracious considerations. The study describes the agency of course tutors, teachers and learners involved in the Schools and Sustainability course, as emergent from a social-ecological context of poverty and inequality, and from an education system with a dual transformative and progressive intent (Taylor, 1999). It uses a spiral approach to cluster-based teacher professional development (Janse van Rensburg & Mhoney, 2000) focusing on the development of autonomous (Bernstein, 1990) and reflexive teachers. With teachers well-disposed and qualified to fill a variety of roles in the classroom, these generative structures and mechanisms had the power to drive active learning processes with potential for manifestation as transformative praxis. Through the analysis of the active learning processes emergent from this context, the study shows that the manifestation of transformative praxis was contingent on relational situated learning, value-based reflexive deliberations, and an action-orientation with an emphasis on an iterative relationship between learning and doing. These findings enable a reframing of an interest in action in response to environmental issue and risk, to an interest in the processes that led up to that action. This provides a nuanced vision of active learning that does not judge an educational process by its outcome. Instead, it can be judged by the depth of the insights into absences (2E), the ability to guide moral deliberations on totality (3L), and by the degree of reality congruence (1M) in the lead up to the development of transformative agency (4D). The study also has a methodological interest. It contributes to educational and social science research in that it applies dialectical critical realist philosophy to a concrete context of active learning enquiry in environmental education. It reports on the value of the onto-axiolgical chain in describing a diachronic, emergent and open-ended process; in providing ontological grounding for analysis (1M); in understanding relationality in situated learing processes (2E); in focusing on value-based reflexive learning (3L) and in understanding transformative learning as “tensed socio-spatialising process” (Bhaskar, 1993: 160) where society is emergent from a stratified ontology, and agency and change are open-ended and flexible processes not wholly determined by the social structures from which they emerge (4D). Considering the knowledge interests defined in the 2011 South African Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education (South Africa. Department of Higher Education and Training, 2011) and the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) which were implemented in South Africa from 2012 (in a phased approach), the study concludes with recommendations for exploring environmental learning in the CAPS. The study proposes working with a knowledge-focused curriculum focusing on the exploration and deepening of foundational environmental concepts, developing relational situated learning processes for meaningful local application of knowledge, supporting transformative praxis through the “unity of theory and practice in practice” (Bhaskar, 1993: 9), and implementing a spiral approach to cluster-based teacher professional development.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Robustness and generalizability of supervised learning algorithms depend on the quality of the labeled data set in representing the real-life problem. In many real-world domains, however, we may not have full knowledge of the underlying data-generating mechanism, which may even have an evolving nature introducing new classes continually. This constitutes a partially-observed setting, where it would be impractical to obtain a labeled data set exhaustively defined by a fixed set of classes. Traditional supervised learning algorithms, assuming an exhaustive training library, would misclassify a future sample of an unobserved class with probability one, leading to an ill-defined classification problem. Our goal is to address situations where such assumption is violated by a non-exhaustive training library, which is a very realistic yet an overlooked issue in supervised learning. In this dissertation we pursue a new direction for supervised learning by defining self-adjusting models to relax the fixed model assumption imposed on classes and their distributions. We let the model adapt itself to the prospective data by dynamically adding new classes/components as data demand, which in turn gradually make the model more representative of the entire population. In this framework, we first employ suitably chosen nonparametric priors to model class distributions for observed as well as unobserved classes and then, utilize new inference methods to classify samples from observed classes and discover/model novel classes for those from unobserved classes. This thesis presents the initiating steps of an ongoing effort to address one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in supervised learning and indicates the potential for taking new perspectives in some of the most heavily studied areas of machine learning: novelty detection, online class discovery and semi-supervised learning.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Traditional treatment strategy development for diseases involves the identification of target proteins related to disease states, and the interference of these proteins with drug molecules. Computational drug discovery and virtual screening from thousands of chemical compounds have accelerated this process. The thesis presents a comprehensive framework of computational drug discovery using system biology approaches. The thesis mainly consists of two parts: disease biomarker identification and disease treatment discoveries. The first part of the thesis focuses on the research in biomarker identification for human diseases in the post-genomic era with an emphasis in system biology approaches such as using the protein interaction networks. There are two major types of biomarkers: Diagnostic Biomarker is expected to detect a given type of disease in an individual with both high sensitivity and specificity; Predictive Biomarker serves to predict drug response before treatment is started. Both are essential before we even start seeking any treatment for the patients. In this part, we first studied how the coverage of the disease genes, the protein interaction quality, and gene ranking strategies can affect the identification of disease genes. Second, we addressed the challenge of constructing a central database to collect the system level data such as protein interaction, pathway, etc. Finally, we built case studies for biomarker identification for using dabetes as a case study. The second part of the thesis mainly addresses how to find treatments after disease identification. It specifically focuses on computational drug repositioning due to its low lost, few translational issues and other benefits. First, we described how to implement literature mining approaches to build the disease-protein-drug connectivity map and demonstrated its superior performances compared to other existing applications. Second, we presented a valuable drug-protein directionality database which filled the research gap of lacking alternatives for the experimental CMAP in computational drug discovery field. We also extended the correlation based ranking algorithms by including the underlying topology among proteins. Finally, we demonstrated how to study drug repositioning beyond genomic level and from one dimension to two dimensions with clinical side effect as prediction features.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Environmental planning is very cumbersome work for environmentalists, government agencies like USDA and NRCS, and farmers. There are a number of conflicts and issues involved in such a decision making process. This research is based on the work to provide a common platform for environmental planning called WRESTORE (Watershed Restoration using Spatio-Temporal Optimization of Resources). We have designed a system that can be used to provide the best management practices for environmental planning. A distributed system was designed to combine high performance computing power of clusters/supercomputers in running various environmental model simulations. The system is designed to be a multi-user system just like a multi-user operating system. A number of stakeholders can log-on and run environmental model simulations simultaneously, seamlessly collaborate, and make collective judgments by visualizing their landscapes. In the research, we identified challenges in running such a system and proposed various solutions. One challenge was the lack of fast optimization algorithm. In our research, several algorithms are utilized such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Learning Automaton (LA). However, the criticism is that LA has a slow rate of convergence and that both LA and GA have the problem of getting stuck in local optima. We tried to solve the multi-objective problems using LA in batch mode to make the learning faster and accurate. The problems where the evaluation of the fitness functions for optimization is a bottleneck, like running environmental model simulation, evaluation of a number of such models in parallel can give considerable speed-up. In the multi-objective LA, different weight pair solutions were evaluated independently. We created their parallel versions to make them practically faster in computation. Additionally, we extended the parallelism concept with the batch mode learning. Another challenge we faced was in User Modeling. There are a number of User Modeling techniques available. Selection of the best user modeling technique is a hard problem. In this research, we modeled user's preferences and search criteria using an ANN (Artificial Neural Network). Training an ANN with limited data is not always feasible. There are many situations where a simple modeling technique works better if the learning data set is small. We formulated ways to fine tune the ANN in case of limited data and also introduced the concept of Deep Learning in User Modeling for environmental planning system.