NCT02508922.

Providing effective, high quality feedback that students engage with remains an important issue in higher education today, particularly in the context of academic language support where feedback helps socialise students to academic writing practices. Technology-enhanced feedback, such as audio and video feedback, is becoming more widely used, and as such, it is important to evaluate whether these methods help students engage with the feedback more successfully than conventional methods. While previous research has explored students’ perceptions of audio-visual feedback, this paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining the impact of the audio-visual mode on undergraduate students’ engagement with feedback compared to written-only feedback. Evidence from an analysis of feedback comments (n = 1040) and corresponding revisions as well as interviews (n = 3) is used to draw conclusions about the value of providing audio-visual feedback to help students revise their writing more successfully. In line with multimedia learning theory (Mayer 2009), it is argued that the multimodal format, conversational tone, verbal explanations and personalised feel of audio-visual feedback allows for a more successful engagement with the feedback, particularly for students with a lower level of English language proficiency.

The purpose of this case study is to discuss the effectiveness of peer assisted learning as an engagement strategy for first year engineering students. Studies have shown that engagement is critical to student success in higher education and that it requires a multifaceted approach that recognises the diverse needs of contemporary heterogeneous cohorts. By using the case study of a peer facilitator in a Mathematics for Engineers unit at an Australian University we hope to provide some insights into the Peer Assisted Study Session (PASS) model of student engagement and learning support. PASS is the nomenclature commonly used in Australia for Supplemental Instruction; a peer facilitated learning model that has been shown to improve students' academic performance as well as assisting in their transition to the university environment. The authors are the coordinator of the PASS programme and a student facilitator from an Australian university. Kiyomi Dunphy, the student facilitator, provides insight into her experience of running weekly study sessions for students and this is supplemented with comments from the programme attendees. Rather than focusing on quantitative data, we have taken a qualitative approach, with the intention of explicating the model as it operates in our particular context.

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The Transition movement is based on the notion that peak oil, climate change and the precarious economic situation cause the greatest potential disruptions to human society and therefore require a pre-emptive response. As such its focus is on proactively creating a future in local communities that meets people‘s psychological and physical needs rather than reacting to the crises that seem imminent. This paper draws on research into the Transition movement in the Australian context that considers the role of inner Transition which is one of the features that differentiates Transition from other movements for change. However, inner Transition has tended to be marginalised in the movement, because ultimately, action oriented outcomes take precedence over the often difficult work associated with group dynamics and relational experiences associated with inner Transition, even though they can affect the carriage and outcomes of activities and projects. The privileging of outer over inner Transition and action over process is a reflection of broader society’s grappling with the human dynamics inherent in any process of change. Where such concerns are unproblematised, this raises questions about the extent to which movements replicate existing paradigms and structures or take a prefigurative approach and challenge and re-imagine them in their practice.

Welcome to this special issue on 'Progress and challenges in forecast verification'. Five years have passed since the first special issue on forecast verification and the field has moved so far since then that we felt that it would be beneficial to take stock of what has happened during this period and to consider possible future developments in the field.Five years ago the emphasis of the Special Issue was on bringing verification methodologies and their applications, both in research and operational activities, to the attention of a wider community. It highlighted the importance of the novel spatial techniques for a deeper understanding of weaknesses and strengths of models and of user-oriented verification whereby user communities are identified and consulted a priori when it comes to developing verification systems. It was then recognized that the importance of verification should not be underestimated, as it is necessary for monitoring forecast quality, for choosing alternative forecasting systems, for guiding their improvements and for providing users with uncertainty information to help in decision making processes.Five-years on we have been looking at the progress made in the field and this Special Issue contains a collection of papers that look at many aspects of the science of verification and at different forecast time scales: from the short range forecast to climate prediction.The first article in this issue is a review paper by Ebert et al . on the progress made on verification methods and practices. The authors take note of the improvements of verification reporting and of a wider and more sophisticated use of scores to assess model performance. There are still challenges linked to the ever-rising need for seamless prediction and synergies between data assimilation and verification. The paper has a comprehensive list of references for the readers interested in more detailed accounts. The second paper by Chen et al . is an example of improved verification reporting practice and it discusses the experience of China Meteorological Administration in setting up a unified verification system to evaluate regional and national models.Mariani et al . look at the application of verification methodologies to a plethora of model configurations in order to assess the differences due to changes including spatial resolution and domain, boundary conditions and nesting design. The verification exercise is used to define the final settings of the operational model. Verification methods in an operational setting are also discussed in North et al . with the specific aim of introducing the two novel scores SEEPS and SEDI, which are resistant to hedging, into the standard set of measures used in forecast system development processes. The common denominator of the next group of articles is the use of spatial verification methods to assess the quality of precipitation forecasts (Mittermaier et al .), of cloud cover spatial and temporal evolution (Mittermaier and Bullock) and of cloud cover forecast assessed against satell...

This chapter explains the implementation, facilitation and experiences of a community of practice; video-based Peer Assisted Study Sessions (vPASS), which utilised recorded lectures and collaborative learning methodologies for at-risk undergraduate students studying Mathematics for Engineers. Students who had previously failed this core subject, were invited to enrol in the vPASS mode of Mathematics for Engineers which provided a facilitated, small group learning environment. They found significant benefits in the experiences of learning together and supporting each other's learning trajectory through the challenging content. We consider vPASS through the lenses of 'mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire' which Wenger describes as processes that contribute to communities of practice (Wenger in Social learning systems and communities of practice. Springer and the Open University, Milton Keynes, pp 179-197, 2010b, p. 72). Although this program was based in a particular subject, the principles and approaches which underlie vPASS are transferable to other discipline areas. Transforming the experience of learning from a lecture into a social meaning making activity provides students with life-long learning skills; a graduate attribute of many institutions. It can also enable students to take greater responsibility for their learning as their motivation increases and they develop effective study strategies.

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