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:Leveraging online learning tools and encouraging transfer of learning to practice remains a critical challenge to successful continuing professional development (CPD) offerings. Four sets of factors are essential to the transfer of learning from CPD into practice: learner characteristics, instructional design, content, and environment. Through incorporating elements of educational theories/frameworks into the planning of online CPD activities, educators can maximize opportunities for learning transfer. In this article, we highlight four educational theories/frameworks that provide useful insight to tackle these interrelated factors in online CPD: Self-Determination Theory considers the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of participants, which can be encouraged through flexibility, customization, and choices available in online formats. Practical Inquiry Model encourages intentionally planning and embedding opportunities for reflection and dialogue in online activities to enhance knowledge application. Virtual Communities of Practice can be used to transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, promoting interactions and relationships where participants learn from peers. Finally, Professional Learning Networks can be fostered through developing interpersonal connections and sharing resources for informal and flexible learning. Online CPD is likely to increase in the future, and educators should consider elements of these educational theories/frameworks in the design and delivery of CPD to support participants' application of newly acquired knowledge.

Motion synthesis in a dynamic environment has been a long-standing problem for character animation. Methods using motion capture data tend to scale poorly in complex environments because of their larger capturing and labeling requirement. Physics-based controllers are effective in this regard, albeit less controllable. In this paper, we present CARL, a quadruped agent that can be controlled with high-level directives and react naturally to dynamic environments. Starting with an agent that can imitate individual animation clips, we use Generative Adversarial Networks to adapt high-level controls, such as speed and heading, to action distributions that correspond to the original animations. Further fine-tuning through the deep reinforcement learning enables the agent to recover from unseen external perturbations while producing smooth transitions. It then becomes straightforward to create autonomous agents in dynamic environments by adding navigation modules over the entire process. We evaluate our approach by measuring the agent's ability to follow user control and provide a visual analysis of the generated motion to show its effectiveness.

In this paper, we present the comprehensive version of CSIEC (Computer Simulation in Educational Communication), an interactive web-based humancomputer dialogue system with natural language for English instruction, and its tentative application and evaluation in English education. First, we briefly introduce the motivation for this project, survey the related works and illustrate the system structure with flow diagram. Then we describe its pedagogical functions, especially free chatting and chatting on a given topic. We summarise the free Internet usage within 6 months and introduce its integration into English classrooms, as well as the formal evaluation results of the integration. The evaluation findings show that the chatting function has been improved and fully used by the users, and the application of the CSIEC system in English instruction can motivate the learners to use English and enhance their learning process. Lastly, we discuss the application-driven approach of system development and draw some conclusions for future improvement. Motivation, underlying theories and related works Discrepancy between the great demand of English instruction and the actual poor situationWith the rapid economic, cultural and educational internationalisation of China, the importance of cross-cultural communication is gaining more and more attention. English, as an international language, is treated as a key tool for the development and cultivation of such a communicational ability. Therefore, English language is now listed as one of the three core courses in China's elementary and secondary education and as a compulsory course in higher education. English learning is being emphasised more and more in this country.