In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the use of health and sports-related smartphone applications (apps). This is also reflected in App-stores, which are stacked with thousands of health- and sports-apps, with new apps launched each day. These apps have great potential to monitor and support people’s physical activity and health. For users, however, it is difficult to know which app suits their needs. In this paper, we present an online tool that supports the decision-making process for choosing an appropriate app. We constructed and validated a screening instrument to assess app content quality, together with the assessment of users’ needs. Both served as input for building the tool through various iterations with prototypes and user tests. This resulted in an online tool which relies on app content quality scores to match the users’ needs with apps that score high in the screening instrument on those particular needs. Users can add new apps to the database via the screening instrument, making the tool self-supportive and future proof. A feedback loop allows users to give feedback on the recommended app and how well it meets their needs. This feedback is added to the database and used in future filtering and recommendations. The principles used can be applied to other areas of sports, physical activity and health to help users to select an app that suits their needs. Potentially increasing the long-term use of apps to monitor and to support physical activity and health.
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In the Netherlands, and in many other countries, teacher policy and teacher education are strongly focused on ensuring that teachers meet certain minimum standards. As all student teachers need to meet these standards, teacher education programmes might put the main emphasis on the ‘average’ student and pay little attention to students who can perform better, which would lead to a middle-ofthe-road perspective on teachers and teacher education curricula. However, there is a growing awareness within higher education of the diversity of students with respect to their abilities and ambitions. In the Netherlands, there are initiatives to develop excellence programmes and honours programmes that recognize and accept student diversity. Such programmes offer ‘excellent’ students new challenges in the development of their excellence. But as ‘excellence’ is not centrally defined, higher education institutes can define the concept independently. Here, we present two examples of teacher education institutes that have developed honours programmes that emphasize excellent student teachers. While traditionally honours programmes in universities are focused on stimulating outstanding research performance of excellent students, in both examples a different focus is taken. The honours programmes in these universities for applied sciences do not focus on academic performance, but focus more directly on the roles of outstanding teachers in schools. One of these institutes focuses on primary teacher roles, the other on secondary teacher roles. Both use research in the content of the honours programmes and in the evaluation of the programmes. Here, an analysis of the two programmes is related to developments in teacher policy and the teaching profession with respect to teacher excellence, e.g. the recent recommendation from the Netherlands Education Council to nominate the top 5% of teachers as ‘excellent teachers’ – a recommendation that was received with mixed feelings by teachers, teachers’ unions and school leaders
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Postdisciplinarity makes claims on ontological, epistemic, and methodological levels, but it is inevitably a personal philosophical stance. This article represents an existentialist approach to the discourse on postdisciplinarity, offering reflective narratives of three academics. Tomas Pernecky discusses creativity, criticality, freedom, and methodological and epistemic pluralism; Ana María Munar reveals her journey of epistemological awakening; and Brian Wheeller underscores the importance of researchers' subjective and emotive voice. Jointly, the authors depict postdisciplinarity as an invitation to conceptual and interpretive eclecticism, critical analysis, and creative problem solving.
MULTIFILE
Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
This project will develop a digital future challenge based learning joint programme designed within an innovative and flexible academic structure and framework: multi-disciplinary, cross-sectoral and future skills-oriented modules, new curricula and learning pathways. Innovative projects will be developed and implemented, together with stakeholders, to address local and global societal challenges.
Over the past decade, the trend in both the public sector and industry has been to outsource ICT to the cloud. While cost savings are often used as a rationale for outsourcing, another argument that is frequently used is that the cloud improves security. The reasoning behind this is twofold. First, cloud service providers are typically thought to have skilled staff trained in good security practices. Second, cloud providers often have a vastly distributed, highly connected network infrastructure, making them more resilient in the face of outages and denial-of-service attacks. Yet many examples of cloud outages, often due to attacks, call into question whether outsourcing to the cloud does improve security. In this project our goal therefore is to answer two questions: 1) did the cloud make use more secure?and 2) can we provide specific security guidance to support cloud outsourcing strategies? We will approach these questions in a multi-disciplinary fashion from a technical angle and from a business and management perspective. On the technical side, the project will focus on providing comprehensive insight into the attack surface at the network level of cloud providers and their users. We will use a measurement-based approach, leveraging large scale datasets about the Internet, both our own data (e.g. OpenINTEL, a large- scale dataset of active DNS measurements) and datasets from our long-term collaborators, such as CAIDA in the US (BGPStream, Network Telescope) and Saarland University in Germany (AmpPot). We will use this data to study the network infrastructure outside and within cloud environments to structurally map vulnerabilities to attacks as well as to identify security anti-patterns, where the way cloud services are managed or used introduce a weak point that attackers can target. From a business point of view, we will investigate outsourcing strategies for both the cloud providers and their customers. For guaranteeing 100% availability, cloud service providers have to maintain additional capacity at all times. They also need to forecast capacity requirements continuously for financially profitable decisions. If the forecast is lower than the capacity needed, then the cloud is not able to deliver 100% availability in case of an attack. Conversely, if the forecast is substantially higher, the cloud service provider might not be able to make desired profits. We therefore propose to assess the risk profiles of cloud providers (how likely it is a cloud provider is under attack at a given time given the nature of its customers) using available attack data to improve the provider resilience to future attacks. From the costumer perspective, we will investigate how we can support cloud outsourcing by taking into consideration business and technical constraints. Decision to choose a cloud service provider is typically based on multiple criteria depending upon the company’s needs (security and operational). We will develop decision support systems that will help in mapping companies’ needs to cloud service providers’ offers.
