4 From Learning to Adaptive Programming and Management

The aim of the study was to investigate the application and importance of Learning and Adaptive Management by the Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development (MWACSMED) and beneficiaries when implementing development programs in Zaka district. The study investigated the objectives of the programs implemented by MWACSMED in Zaka district, the extent to which learning, risk management and adaptive management mechanisms are used by MWACSMED Zaka district are effective. The study also examined the challenges faced MWACSMED and beneficiaries with development programs in Zaka district. The study also aimed at developing a model for learning, risk management, adaptive management, monitoring, and evaluation for the efficient and effective implementation of development programs and the Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, Adaptive and Risk Management model (MELARM) was developed. The researcher chose to conduct his research in this area because Zaka district is one of the districts in the country that is heavily reliant on subsistence farming, with farmers lacking adequate rain and inputs. Furthermore, there is no other industry or activity in the district that contributes to people's well-being. According to Chingarande and Matondi (2020:3), Zaka district is in a province that is reliant on activities such as livestock production, irrigated farming, wildlife conservation and smallholder agricultural production to support its population. Zimbabwe, where Zaka district is in the province of Masvingo used to be one of Southern Africa’s most vibrant, productive, and resilient countries, but the country has been facing economic and political challenges for close to two decades linked to decades of poor governance and corruption. Approximately 63% of Zimbabwean households are living in poverty and 16% in extreme poverty (USAID Country Development Cooperation Strategy 2016-2021:4). Given the above challenges in Zimbabwe, it is important to investigate whether decisionmakers are investing in long-term management approaches such as Adaptive Management. Decision-makers tend to be reluctant to invest in long-term management approaches which cover the concept of Adaptive Management and choose small-scale experiments instead. Moreover, they do not utilize opportunities to adjust and make improvements in their approach to management. Managers have often been making decisions based on funding opportunities that are short-term and political requests, rather than using the actual objectives of a program. The study used the quantitative approach in the form of a questionnaire that was designed using Google forms and shared through a link that was send to research participants through emails and WhatsApp. The sample population for the research questionnaire was 10 officials from MWACSMED and 7 beneficiaries of the programs managed by the Ministry in Zaka district. As shown by the study, the Ministry has not yet fully recognized the use of Learning and Adaptive Management to address the complexity and uncertainty of development programs. The Ministry has been managing programs through traditional monitoring and evaluation systems. The results of the study show that the Ministry was not using Adaptive Management approaches or learning thorough monitoring and evaluation systems, which may be because of socio-economic and political reasons. The introduction of adaptive programming and management calls for using information and learning to inform adjustments during implementation, which requires monitoring and evaluation systems that go beyond reporting on pre-specified indicators The study made recommendations for Learning and Adaptive Management mechanisms that are essential for development projects. The study also drafted a model known as the Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, Adaptive and Risk Management Framework (MELARM). These recommendations are all based on the findings of the study. In general, government departments should avoid traditional thinking about program cycles, and they should merge program design, implementation, and evaluation through Learning and Adaptive Management. Government departments/agencies should also identify and document how procurement, contracting, work planning, reporting and risk management can foster adaptive programming and management to achieve intended development goals.

In 1998, MacMillan Bloedel (now Weyerhaeuser) committed to a system of Stewardship Zones and to replacing clearcutting with variable retention over its 1.1 million ha coastal tenure. The decision began a grand experiment in forest planning and practice, which the company committed to monitor and refine through an adaptive management program. The program was most challenging to design and implement for biodiversity. Key elements of the program were: creating a criterion and associated indicators, developing a list of focused questions, and developing a cost-effective design for monitoring and learning. The final step in any adaptive management program is linking the monitoring back to specific management actions. We provide examples of successful linkages back for each of the three major indicators of biodiversity: ecosystem representation, habitat structure, and organisms. We discuss major difficulties that arise when developing management responses to the complex issue of sustaining biological diversity and note four major challenges to the design and implementation of any adaptive management program. Key words: adaptive management, biodiversity, indicators, monitoring, variable retention harvesting

Adaptive management has been presented as a method for the remediation, restoration, and protection of ecological systems. Recent reviews have found that the implementation of adaptive management has been unsuccessful in many instances. We present a modification of the model first formulated by Wyant and colleagues that puts ecological risk assessment into a central role in the adaptive management process. This construction has 3 overarching segments. Public engagement and governance determine the goals of society by identifying endpoints and specifying constraints such as costs. The research, engineering, risk assessment, and management section contains the decision loop estimating risk, evaluating options, specifying the monitoring program, and incorporating the data to re-evaluate risk. The 3rd component is the recognition that risk and public engagement can be altered by various externalities such as climate change, economics, technological developments, and population growth. We use the South River, Virginia, USA, study area and our previous research to illustrate each of these components. In our example, we use the Bayesian Network Relative Risk Model to estimate risks, evaluate remediation options, and provide lists of monitoring priorities. The research, engineering, risk assessment, and management loop also provides a structure in which data and the records of what worked and what did not, the learning process, can be stored. The learning process is a central part of adaptive management. We conclude that risk assessment can and should become an integral part of the adaptive management process. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2017;13:115-126. © 2016 SETAC.

Popularized by scientists in the 1970s, adaptive management is an integrative, multi-disciplinary approach to managing landscapes and natural resources. Despite its broad appeal many critics complain that adaptive management rarely works in practice as prescribed in theory. This chapter traces the history and evolution of the concept and assess its implementation challenges. One reason adaptive management has not always delivered on its promise to make natural resource management more “rational” is that in the real world of policymaking scientists and natural resource managers must contend with advocates that have conflicting values and goals. Scientists and managers also operate in the context of institutions that create particular constraints and opportunities, and are generally inflexible and resistant to change. In recognition of these sociopolitical realities, the focus of much adaptive management practice and scholarship has shifted to governance, particularly collaboration with stakeholders, transformation of the institutions responsible for management, and the process of social learning.

The lower Roanoke River in North Carolina, USA, has been regulated by a series of dams since the 1950s. This river and its floodplain have been identified by The Nature Conservancy, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the State of North Carolina as critical resources for the conservation of bottomland hardwoods and other riparian and in-stream biota and communities. Upstream dams are causing extended floods in the growing season for bottomland hardwood forests, threatening their survival. A coalition of stakeholders including public agencies and private organizations is cooperating with the dam managers to establish an active adaptive management program to reduce the negative impacts of flow regulation, especially extended growing season inundation, on these conservation targets. We introduce the lower Roanoke River, describe the regulatory context for negotiating towards an active adaptive management program, present our conservation objective for bottomland hardwoods, and describe investigations in which we successfully employed a series of models to develop testable management hypotheses. We propose adaptive management strategies that we believe will enable the bottomland hardwoods to regenerate and support their associated biota and that are reasonable, flexible, and economically sustainable.

Adaptive management requires the merger of management with science to provide robust knowledge about the effect of management actions. It can also be applied as a model of collaborative learning to support effective resource management. Using the example of adaptive management of native forests affected by introduced deer in New Zealand, we set out to identify some of the tensions that become apparent when adaptive management is applied in this way. We describe the process of adaptive management as it was applied in this case study. Drawing from project documentation and participant reflections on the learning process, we highlight three key lessons: (1) the need to create 'space' - i.e. a permissive environment that allows for an evolving process rather than a formalised and legalistic one; (2) that adaptive management cannot be expected to progress in a standardised way but instead, role clarity will emerge over time and this will contribute to an emerging vision of contribution that participants see for their project; and (3) the collaborative learning component of adaptive management poses a new challenge for science as rather than providing solutions to management issues, scientists contribute technical expertise and methods as part of the management

This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of implementing a cybernetic approach in learning management in developing students’ creativity and responsibility for learning at SMKN 1 Sawoo. Using a qualitative phenomenological approach, the study explores the experiences and meanings constructed by teachers, students, and school administrators regarding the application of the cybernetic approach in the learning process. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and documentation, with participants selected purposively. The data were analyzed cyclically using an interactive analysis model. The findings show that the implementation of a cybernetic approach in learning management contributes to a more planned, controlled, and sustainable learning process, accompanied by more intensive teacher–student interaction. This approach positively influences students’ creativity, as reflected in their ability to generate ideas, think innovatively, and produce varied learning outcomes. In addition, students’ responsibility for learning improves, as indicated by increased discipline, independence, and commitment to completing learning tasks. These results suggest that the cybernetic approach has the potential to support more adaptive and meaningful learning management in vocational education contexts.

Reflections on the use of Bayesian belief networks for adaptive management

Adaptive management and water temperature variability within a South African river system: What are the management options?

Summary The recognition that biodiversity conservation requires more than a system of reserves has led to the need to consider the outcomes of land management actions, such as timber harvesting, in the matrix land outside reserves. The design of harvesting systems can be guided by the natural disturbance regime, which in Tasmania's lowland wet eucalypt forests is infrequent, intense wildfire. Clearfell, burn and sow silviculture has been used since the 1960s for harvesting these forests but, while this system is practical and effectively regenerates eucalypts in harvested coupes, it is predicted to lead to losses at the coupe level of late-successional species and structures that would survive into stands regenerating following natural wildfire. Variable retention silviculture is thus currently being implemented as an alternative to clearfelling in wet old-growth forest on public land (state forest) in Tasmania. In contrast to clearfelling, variable retention has the explicit ecological goal of maintaining some species, habitats and structural legacies from the pre-harvest forest into the harvested and regenerating stand. This paper synthesises biodiversity findings from the Warra Silvicultural Systems Trial (SST), established in 1997, and demonstrates that aggregated retention is the optimal form of variable retention for ensuring coupe-scale persistence (‘lifeboating’) of mature-forest biodiversity. In addition to providing retained forest, aggregates are also designed to facilitate recolonisation of harvested areas by mature-forest species (‘forest influence’), and to provide connectivity across the forest stand. In the last few years, more than 50 aggregated-retention coupes have been harvested in mature forest across Tasmania. Development and implementation of variable retention in Tasmania is an example of active adaptive management, which we describe in relation to five steps for a formalised adaptive management program, indicating how ecological criteria are incorporated in operational guidelines for implementation of aggregated retention.

A conceptual modeling of an adaptive or a flexible learning content management (LCM) system is an initialized step toward successful implement of a distance education system on Internet. Its aim is at planning and accomplishing the responsiveness to the learning content (re)configuration required for meeting the students' learning goals. Since learning content is composed of the relative learning objects, their (re)configurations and reuses are essential to the construction (modification) of a new (existing) studying subject (content). The alternatives of appropriately aggregating a number of relative learning objects to structure the learning subject certainly is to the success of the LCM system implementation. This paper thus presents such a conceptualization that is able to model an adaptive LCM system by defining its learning object constituents as the respectively reusable active objects represented in the nature of the object-orientation (OO) software. The aspect of the proposed OO-based active objects instruments the modeling process of an adaptive LCM system.

The implementation of learning management system, lecturers must prepare the necessary materials and components. However, the fact is that there are 63% difficulties in compiling material in the learning management system. The research aims to analyze the impact of implementing learning using LMS in higher education and to find solutions to overcome obstacles and difficulties in implementing learning using a learning management system. The research method used is a survey by distributing instruments. Data collection techniques were by distributing instruments to 132 people consisting of lecturers and students who are directly involved in the learning process and conducting random interviews to ensure the correctness of the data from the survey. Analysis techniques using SPSS Version 25.0 by forming bar charts, line charts, and pie charts and interpreting them. As a result, the obstacles, difficulties, and impacts of using the learning management system during the learning process were found. The obstacles and difficulties lie in the preparation of materials, models, and assessment tools used which are not provided to students through the LMS. The material is not stated in the media used and is not given an assessment to students, so the impact is that students are unable to measure their abilities. In conclusion, every lecturer must prepare materials, models, and assessment instruments before using the learning management system in implementing course learning.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, all learning activities began to be conducted online. Online learning aims to meet educational standards by utilizing information technology to distribute subject matter and enable collaboration between students and teachers. This concept is known as the learning management system (LMS). A solution to support online learning policies is an LMS with hybrid-based gamification features. This article discusses the design of a distance learning LMS with hybrid-based gamification features. Such an LMS is more attractive than other LMS systems because it is equipped with gamification features. Gamification aims to make learning more engaging by incorporating game thinking, game design, and game mechanics into the learning process. This application is a website that has been converted into native code for platforms like iOS and Android and the hybrid application can be accessed easily via a smartphone. Students can be motivated to learn by using gamification in the LMS.
 Keywords: Edu-smart, LMS, online learning

The study aims to integrate neural network algorithm that predicts students' vulnerability of not having graduation on time to an adaptive learning management system. Neural network is one of the popular machine learning techniques because of its learning algorithm. The learning algorithm is focused on updating weights of the edges in order to produce minimal mean squared error between actual and predicted values. The integration of this platform could lead to much efficient learning management system as LMS is mainly driven to provide individualized and personalized learning tailored to specific requirements and learning preferences. The neural network algorithm is designed to classify students with learning difficulty so that administrators can formulate remediation and academic support policies.

Often we discuss about student's educational needs and wishes. What about teacher's needs and/or wishes in terms of educational system functional rules? Simply the teachers should sometimes use paper and students should always use computers or others devices for the same material or task? We think not. But we estimate they both needs a minimal package of teaching and learning tools for a well-structured learning management system (LMS) that will compose a reliable and decent virtual learning environment. Successfully distance learning imply a well-organized pedagogical approach and, subsequently, a structured learning environment. In this perspective, if we struggle to improve the results, we consider that both teachers’ and students’ perspective must be taken into account. We agree that the students must have all the tools that they need to learn. But for this purpose, the teachers should also have the essential tools for managing the learning process. If we demand why the LMS's are not entirely accepted as good learning environments, a good reasons seems to be even the lack of this minimal technical tools for managing teaching-learning processes. This paper emphasizes the teachers’ experience of the most utilized learning management systems (LMS), in both technical and pedagogical perspective. First, in technical perspective, we focus on the strengths and weakness of some commonly used LMSs: Moodle, Blackboard, Google Drive and Google Scholar, Sakai, Joomla LMS, Wordpress LMS. Second, we struggle about pedagogical demands for an ideal LMS: we outlined some of the most useful tools for teacher as didactic process manager, as they result from a survey on some existing software applications (the most used LMS's). We tried to propose the most necessary tools for teachers and students in order to cover the entire teaching and learning process. Also, we propose an “ideal” LMS, completed with functionalities imposed by the pedagogical and administrative norms.