Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Secondary Education / Janice R. Wissman / This study was an investigation of mission, vision, funding strategies, and student services for distance learning as expressed by university administrators in land grant universities and state universities, and those institutions that are designated as both land grant and state universities by the state legislature. Three research questions guided the study The study employed a survey distributed through e-mail. The questionnaire was sent to 261 senior administrators; the chief academic officers, chief business officers, and chief information officers in 37 land grant and state universities and 13 institutions that are both land grant and state universities. The return rate was 30%. The institutional mission and administrator’s vision for offering distance learning survey responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The study also used correlation, confirmed by factor analysis, to determine if there was a relationship among the administrators’ responses regarding mission, vision, and funding. The data were analyzed with ANOVA and fishers least means difference test. These tests determined if there were differences in the administrators’ responses between the type or sizes of higher education institutions on mission, vision of administrators. The data analysis indicated that the type of institution did not yield significant differences. The difference of means test indicated there were differences in the student population size of the institutions. The responses indicated the mission or purpose for offering distance learning was to save money for the institution, and support degree completion for former students. The responses related to administrative vision show initiating a distance learning program and a being leader among higher education institutions were the reasons for a distance learning program. The content analysis method was employed to determine the roles of the administrators in the survey. The administrators’ responses related to distance learning were consistent with their roles in the institution. The study also produced results related to student services institutions provide for distance learning students, how the student services were provided, on or off campus or both locations and the funding sources for the student services.

In the last decades, the increasing number of new generation satellite images characterized by a better spectral, spatial and temporal resolution with respect to the past has provided unprecedented source of information for monitoring climate changes.To exploit this wealth of data, powerful and automatic methods to analyze remote sensing images need to be implemented. Accordingly, the objective of this thesis is to develop advanced methods for the analysis of multitemporal multispectral remote sensing images to support climate change applications. The thesis is divided into two main parts and provides four novel contributions to the state-of-the-art. In the first part of the thesis, we exploit multitemporal and multispectral remote sensing data for accurately monitoring two essential climate variables. The first contribution presents a method to improve the estimation of the glacier mass balance provided by physically-based models. Unlike most of the literature approaches, this method integrates together physically-based models, remote sensing data and in-situ measurements to achieve an accurate and comprehensive glacier mass balance estimation. The second contribution addresses the land cover mapping for monitoring climate change at high spatial resolution. Within this work, we developed two processing chains: one for the production of a recent (2019) static high resolution (10 m) land cover map at subcontinental scale, and the other for the production of a long-term record of regional high resolution (30 m) land cover maps. The second part of this thesis addresses the common challenges faced while performing the analysis of multitemporal multispectral remote sensing data. In this context, the third contribution deals with the multispectral images cloud occlusions problem. Differently from the literature, instead of performing computationally expensive cloud restoration techniques, we study the robustness of deep learning architectures such as Long Short Term Memory classifier to cloud cover. Finally, we address the problem of the large scale training set definition for multispectral data classification. To this aim, we propose an approach that leverages on available low resolution land cover maps and domain adaptation techniques to provide representative training sets at large scale. The proposed methods have been tested on Sentinel-2 and Landsat 5, 7, 8 multispectral images. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the methods proposed in this thesis.

The Countried experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples of (Australia), ground a resilience and strength in sovereign thinking through the Stories we share laterally with family and inter-ancestrally through our connections to the Dreaming. The stories we share develop a sense of inalienability we have that is connected to the Countries of origin we share and identify with across the continental scape of Land, Water and Sky Country. As a formative philosophical assumption, the Countried existence that this dissertation develops, illuminates the significance of this research thinking to contribute to the continued development of Indigenous education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students attending secondary high schools across (Australia). By attending to the ways Elders as significant Indigenous leaders describe and develop their storied lives through lived experience, this Countried philosophy emerges through the Storied knowing of Country. By examining the approaches to learning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students adopt, further evidence can be contributed to the research surrounding Indigenous thinking and cognitive approaches to thinking through education learning tasks. By examining the perceptions and beliefs of non-indigenous teachers, this dissertation aims to contribute evidence to Indigenous pedagogies that teachers can deploy in the delivery of meaningful Indigenous Knowledge curricula content. Summatively, this thesis found that when deep engagements are made into the notion of inalienability of Countried experience, salient avenues of thinking and learning and teaching emerge surrounding the ways education can continue to elaborate and relate meaningfully to the First Peoples of Australia.