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The paper investigates the nature of Kenya's entrepreneurship education ecosystem (EEE) through a comparative analysis of three entrepreneurship education programs and an examination of how the institutions foster a favourable entrepreneurial environment. This study looks at the entrepreneurship education ecosystem through the lens of universities, NGO's and private institutes in Kenya.
A systemic analysis of EEE is provided by utilizing the Actiotope Model as a conceptual framework. The exploratory research adopts a pragmatic mixed-method methodological approach best suited to understand the research problem.
The results reveal that entrepreneurship education at higher education institutions was primarily theoretical and relied on traditional forms of entrepreneurship education. Recurring rigid patterns show minimal personalization of content and learning styles within the University, with more personalization reported in the Mully Model of education and the more specialized entrepreneurship program of the Identity Projects.
The adaptation of the Actiotope Model provided a new and unique approach to analyzing entrepreneurship ecosystems. The person-centred approach of the model provides valuable insights to learners and to entrepreneurship education institutions and researchers.
Enhanced collaboration between the different entrepreneurial education stakeholders could be a more effective short to medium-term solution to addressing the gaps in entrepreneurial education at tertiary institutions.
In the long term, the study recommends adopting practical-based and goal-oriented entrepreneurship teaching models.
Social businesses have a great positive impact on communities and are a sustainable way to do business today and in the future. This impact can be amplified through the means of digitalization. In the past, traditional for-profit business models have been used to understand the structures of business operations. However, the underlying business model of digital social businesses has not yet been explored. This study presents a building block analysis of business models and a subsequent typology. Digital and social business models are identified via a literature review. The building block analysis encompasses an assessment of the individual business activities contained in the business models. The typology is developed from existing literature utilizing a matrix for the evaluation of digital social businesses. Additionally, five semi-structured expert interviews are conducted to inform, extend, or content the findings of this study. To this end, an inductive coding procedure is applied to the transcribed interviews for the detection of themes within the text. This study contributes to social business model research by providing a first insight into the unique building blocks of digital social business models. It also creates a typology tool based on two parameters, which enables the comparison of digital social businesses.
Mobile technologies have evolved into the means of gaining access to information for learning. Its application in higher education is still a novel concept, particularly in underdeveloped countries. This study is aimed at exploring the views of doctoral students regarding their learning experiences with mobile technologies. Student focus group interviews of 24 doctoral students from 3 different academic institutions were interviewed. The participants’ responses were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to make conclusions. According to the findings of this study, mobile devices play an important part in the learning experiences of doctoral students. The participating students engaged in collaborative learning using mobile technologies. Given the benefits of adopting mobile technologies for learning activities, academic institutions should focus on teaching faculty members to use this to involve students in their learning process. The implications of this study call for the continued advancement of mobile technologies to facilitate effective learning experience for the multitude of mobile learners in developing countries. Another implication is that academic institutions with collaboration with libraries should see the need to develop user friendly mobile app that is linked to the library management system. Such an application would allow the students to optimally use their smartphones and tablets to search the library’s resources from their mobile devices. Training should be offered to the teaching faculty members to come to terms with the benefits of mobile technologies for learning activities.
TREE Jahresbericht 2021/2022
(2023)
Das Institut TREE freut sich, ihnen den Jahresbericht der Jahre 2021 und 2022 präsentieren zu können. Blicken sie mit uns zurück auf zwei herausfordernde Jahre.
Unser neuer Doppel-Jahresbericht 2021/2022 enthält viele, interessante, Beiträgen unserer spannenden, interdisziplinären Forschungprojekte der Bereiche Energie, Modellbildung Simulation, Drohnenforschung, Materialien und Prozesse und Technikkommunikation.
The UN Declaration on the Right to Development (UNDRTD) adopted in 1986 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted in 2015 share a universal concept of development that refers both to individual and collective dimensions of prosperity and thus includes the rights of future generations.2 They thus offer a definition of the relationship between development and human rights that is very relevant for the 21st century. The core norm of the UNDRTD has been defined later as “the right of peoples and individuals to the constant improvement of their wellbeing and to a national and global enabling environment conducive to just, equitable, participatory and human-centred development respectful of all human rights”3.
The continuously increasing number of biomedical scholarly publications makes it challenging to construct document recommendation algorithms that can efficiently navigate through literature. Such algorithms would help researchers in finding similar, relevant, and related publications that align with their research interests. Natural Language Processing offers various alternatives to compare publications, ranging from entity recognition to document embeddings. In this paper, we present the results of a comparative analysis of vector-based approaches to assess document similarity in the RELISH corpus. We aim to determine the best approach that resembles relevance without the need for further training. Specifically, we employ five different techniques to generate vectors representing the text in the documents. These techniques employ a combination of various Natural Language Processing frameworks such as Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, dictionary-based Named Entity Recognition, and state-of-the-art models based on BERT. To evaluate the document similarity obtained by these approaches, we utilize different evaluation metrics that account for relevance judgment, relevance search, and re-ranking of the relevance search. Our results demonstrate that the most promising approach is an in-house version of document embeddings, starting with word embeddings and using centroids to aggregate them by document.
The continuous increase of biomedical scholarly publications makes it challenging to construct document recommendation algorithms to navigate through literature, an important feature for researchers to keep up with relevant publications. Understanding semantic relatedness and similarity between two documents could improve document recommendations. The objective of this study is performing a comparative analysis of vector-based approaches to assess document similarity in the RELISH corpus. Here we present our approach to compare five different techniques to generate vectors representing the text in the documents. These techniques employ a combination of various Natural Language Processing frameworks such as Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, dictionary-based Named Entity Recognition as well as state-of-the-art models based on BERT.
Tourism in Rwanda is challenging. Since the country is small and hilly, it is difficult to tap the potential. As the country is blessed with diverse nature, the Rwandan government decided to combine ecotourism with high-end tourism, to exploit the full potential. This study aims to assess the extent to which these two types of tourism fit together, as well as if sustainability is a decisive argument in this upscale segment. In this context, ecotourism is characterized by its 3 core criteria: education, nature and sustainability. To evaluate the main question: to what extent can ecotourism projects help to promote the perception of Rwanda as a high-end tourist destination on the German market? As well as if sustainability is a decisive argument, interviews with stakeholder from the Rwandan tourism industry as well as German tour operators were conducted, to gain an understanding of both sites and then evaluate them according to the 3 ecotourism core criteria and the demands of high-end tourists. The results showed that there is a difference in the perception of the needs of high-end tourists. While the 3 core criteria seem to be too relevant while they are in booking decision with the tour operator. The high-end lodges in Rwanda state an interest in these three criteria. It is evident from the results that there is a limited active demand for sustainable tourist products, while nature and education are more relevant, but not yet fully exploited. However, all interviewees indicated that ecotourism, and in particular sustainability, is experiencing an increase in demand and will continue to grow in importance in the future. Accordingly, the results suggest the driving markets approach is relevant to further drive demand in that segment.
As a developing economy, Rwanda has been exploring transitioning to being a technologically driven and sustainable economy. Moreover, research on economic growth have focused on the need to improve human capacity potential within increasing demands of climate change activists but there remains a theoretic and practical lacuna in including renewable energy resources in economic growth and expansion of electricity access. Therefore, it is necessary to study the impact of competent skill acquisition and graduate employment market on the interaction mix between economic growth and the expansion of energy access in Rwanda, particularly finding out the problems advancing the non-inclusiveness of engineering graduates, which result to high rate of unemployment and diversions, especially for the graduates specializing in energy fields. As a result, the following open questions were raised with variations 1; how did employees penetrate energy-sector labour market opportunity in Rwanda? 2; what influenced employee’s decision in pursuing a career in Rwanda’s labour market, 3; what were the specific employee competent skills that enabled smooth transition in energy-sector employment after graduation and the ones required to maintain their current positions? 4; what specific competent skills are required for inclusivity of today's engineering graduates in energy sector employment market? The study is qualitative and it uses the exploratory research design. It is based on the growth pole theory employing snowball/chain purposeful sampling technique, whereby key informants in Rwanda energy sector were located. Data was specifically collected from these primary sources through semi-structured interviews and documentary method. Interview data and text from documents were inductively analysed. The study generally recommended institution or program for connecting learning institutions, industry and employment market in the distributed and renewable energy resources to promote competent skills acquisition, competition and improve graduates’ inclusiveness in the expansion of electricity access, thereby leading to economic growth in Rwanda.
Rapid and sustained innovation in developed markets triggers the generation of innovative start-ups, some with disruptive innovations. However, when their offering faces a saturated market with satisfactory and widely available established traditional solutions, many innovative start-ups from these markets may fail. The literature on some start-ups that successfully brought their innovation to emerging markets shows how using leapfrogging traditional solutions to innovative solutions can offer survival and growth opportunities to these start-ups. However, a wide exploitation of leapfrogging processes in emerging markets for survival or business growth of innovative start-ups from developed markets is not yet theorized. To contribute to closing this gap, we propose a conceptual framework to assess the readiness of an emerging market to leapfrog to innovative solutions.
The design of the conceptual framework uses a scenario-planning like approach with two key factors, namely Context Readiness and Value Network Integration. To test and refine the proposed framework and show its relevance for coming to an informed expansion decision making, we used PAR (Participatory Action Research). For the illustration of the application of the proposed conceptual framework, the case of telehealth in Morocco is used.
While 14 % of the world's working-age population currently lives in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this figure will predictably be higher than the rest of the world combined by 2036. If this demographic group finds meaningful employment, Africa experiences an economic and social upswing. To tap this potential, the paper intends to answer the research question, "What are the prerequisites and how are they defined for the successful implementation of sustainable business model ideas in SSA?", by developing a top ten ranking consisting of previously identified sustainable business model ideas best suited for productive use. This achieves a novel approach to implementing future-oriented business models and contributes to current research on sustainable models. Since the geographical scope of SSA is pervasive, this paper focuses on Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, and Uganda. An extensive literature review on these countries was conducted to gain a broader understanding of the situation in SSA. Additionally, research was carried out on the agricultural, energy, and information and communications technology (ICT) sectors to identify the most promising ideas. To contribute to current knowledge, experts were interviewed, and panel discussions were analyzed. Furthermore, the Business Model Canvas (BMC) was combined with the circular economy concept, which served as a framework for the business model ideas. Experts evaluated these ideas, which were subsequently ranked using fuzzy logic with artificial intelligence, based on the system for exploring country risks (CRISK-Explorer). The paper shows that skipping individual development processes opens up promising opportunities, such as the ICT-based business model e-crowd logistics or the renewable energy-based model e-Boda-Boda. Seven prerequisites for the successful implementation of these ideas were identified and defined: value delivery, promising customers, sufficient capital, presence of key resources, possibility to perform the key activities, sustainability, and profitability. The paper concludes by identifying limitations and suggesting avenues for future research.
Channels of distribution are important factors in the connection between goods and services produced for the final consumer and, therefore, determine the effectiveness with which they are delivered and ultimately availed to the final consumers. Globally, studies show that channels of distribution and sales play an essential role in building bonds between manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers and their consumers. The main purpose of this study is to examine the influence of distribution channels and networks on customer choice of fast-moving consumer goods (FCMG) in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The study adopted a quantitative approach and questionnaires were used to collect primary data from 110 customers of Unilever Ghana Limited in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The findings reveal that product-related factors, such as the price of products, perishability of products, size and weight of products, promote the effective distribution of Unilever goods and services, whilst consumer-related factors, such as the number of customers and increased consumer base, promote effective distribution channels. The study also established a positive influence of factors, such as incentives, receiving feedback and sales performance, on customer choice of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). Managers and producers in the FMCGs industry should implement reward and incentive programmes and policies to boost the sale and distribution of fast-moving consumer goods and services in the retail industry in Ghana.
Entrepreneurship is labelled as the panacea for graduate unemployment in Ghana. In the training process, students are mandatorily required to read a course in entrepreneurship, so as to be able to start their own businesses in the face of job adversities caused by the inadequacy of job opportunities created by government and lack of government drive to diversify the economy for more jobs to be created. This study, therefore aimed at investigating the critical precursors of entrepreneurial intentions among higher education students in Ghana. Using the analytical cross-sectional survey design, 250 respondents were recruited from public universities using probability sampling techniques (stratified-disproportionate and simple random) to participate in the survey. Respondents were required to respond to three constructs (entrepreneurial scaffolding, psychological capital, and entrepreneurial intentions). The data analyses were performed using multivariate regression. The study findings showed that entrepreneurial scaffolding and psychological capital were significant predictors of entrepreneurial intentions. The researchers concluded that students' convictions in succeeding or otherwise and planning to engage in entrepreneurial behaviours depended on proper entrepreneurial guidance and a positive mind-set. Therefore, it was recommended that higher education institutions in Ghana strengthened and included practical guides to entrepreneurial training. This will encourage higher education students to consider entrepreneurship, hence, reducing graduate unemployment in Ghana.
The dawn of the 21st Century has witnessed a tremendous increase in trade pacts among nations, resulting in renewed hopes for sustainable enterprise development in emerging economies worldwide. Ghana and other sub- Saharan African (SSA) countries have signed onto several North-South and South-South free trade agreements with the hope of strengthening their presence in the international trade arena, and to promote economic growth in SSA. For over two decades, however, very little has changed, and many have dashed their high hopes as enterprises continue to struggle in SSA. Not even the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) could renew the hopes of sceptics. Several studies opined that enterprises in SSA could improve their domestic and international competitiveness by establishing mutually beneficial partnerships with their counterparts from the Global North and South. This study delved into the issues that affect North-South and South-South business collaborations and recommends key success factors that could help promote mutually beneficial cross-border business partnerships. The research includes both literature and empirical information on the key success factors of business partnerships between African enterprises as well as between African enterprises and firms from the Global North. We approached the study qualitatively using a phenomenological research design. Research participants included important stakeholders in Africa and Europe's international trade and sustainable enterprise development ecosystem. The study identified several challenges with the current business collaborations and recommended new ways of making such partnerships more beneficial.
The differentiation of the higher education sector in Ethiopia has created a new sector of Higher Education Institutions: Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS). Its focus is on educating academically trained experts for regional industries. Close cooperation between industries and UAS is set as a key requirement. However, Ethiopian industries in many regions are not developed enough that those could be considered as active partners for UASs and able to accommodate interns or to provide expert teachers to UAS classes. European UAS structures serve as benchmarks for the Ethiopian Ministry of Education (MoE). Therefore, UAS curricula of study programmes in building-construction, electro-engineering and economic/business/tourism from different European countries build a common ground for Ethiopian UASs. But, due to the lack of industries in the regions, Ethiopian UAS are not able to mirror the European counterparts, where study programmes at bachelor level comprise 70 credits out or 210 credits as practical works, internships and bachelor thesis. - The question is, how can Ethiopian UASs in the absence of companies offer practice-oriented education in their study programmes? This paper refers to the ongoing research, on how to integrate UAS (academic and non-academic) departments at UAS campuses to create internship placements for students in the absence of internship placements in the private sector. Kotebe University of Education (KUE) - as one of the newly founded UAS in Ethiopia - has agreed to act as subject of this try-out.
Here we present a doc-2-doc relevance assessment performed on a subset of the TREC Genomics Track 2005 collection. Our approach includes an experimental set up to manually assess doc-2-doc relevance and the corresponding analysis done on the results obtained from this experiment. The experiment takes one document as a reference and assesses a second document regarding its relevance to the reference one. The consistency of the assessments done by 4 domain experts was evaluated. The lack of agreement between annotators may be due to: i) The abstract lacks key information and/or ii) Lack of experience of the annotators in the evaluation of some topics.
Neuromorphic computing aims to mimic the computational principles of the brain in silico and has motivated research into event-based vision and spiking neural networks (SNNs). Event cameras (ECs) capture local, independent changes in brightness, and offer superior power consumption, response latencies, and dynamic ranges compared to frame-based cameras. SNNs replicate neuronal dynamics observed in biological neurons and propagate information in sparse sequences of ”spikes”. Apart from biological fidelity, SNNs have demonstrated potential as an alternative to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs), such as in reducing energy expenditure and inference time in visual classification. Although potentially beneficial for robotics, the novel event-driven and spike-based paradigms remain scarcely explored outside the domain of aerial robots.
To investigate the utility of brain-inspired sensing and data processing in a robotics application, we developed a neuromorphic approach to real-time, online obstacle avoidance on a manipulator with an onboard camera. Our approach adapts high-level trajectory plans with reactive maneuvers by processing emulated event data in a convolutional SNN, decoding neural activations into avoidance motions, and adjusting plans in a dynamic motion primitive formulation. We conducted simulated and real experiments with a Kinova Gen3 arm performing simple reaching tasks involving static and dynamic obstacles. Our implementation was systematically tuned, validated, and tested in sets of distinct task scenarios, and compared to a non-adaptive baseline through formalized quantitative metrics and qualitative criteria.
The neuromorphic implementation facilitated reliable avoidance of imminent collisions in most scenarios, with 84% and 92% median success rates in simulated and real experiments, where the baseline consistently failed. Adapted trajectories were qualitatively similar to baseline trajectories, indicating low impacts on safety, predictability and smoothness criteria. Among notable properties of the SNN were the correlation of processing time with the magnitude of perceived motions (captured in events) and robustness to different event emulation methods. Preliminary tests with a DAVIS346 EC showed similar performance, validating our experimental event emulation method. These results motivate future efforts to incorporate SNN learning, utilize neuromorphic processors, and target other robot tasks to further explore this approach.
This thesis investigates the benefit of rubrics for grading short answers using an active learning mechanism. Automating short answer grading using Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the active research areas in the education domain. This could save time for the evaluator and invest more time in preparing for the lecture. Most of the research on short answer grading was treated as a similarity task between reference and student answers. However, grading based on reference answers does not account for partial grades and does not provide feedback. Also, the grading is automatic that tries to replace the evaluator. Hence, using rubrics for short answer grading with active learning eliminates the drawbacks mentioned earlier.
Initially, the proposed approach is evaluated on the Mohler dataset, popularly used to benchmark the methodology. This phase is used to determine the parameters for the proposed approach. Therefore, the approach with the selected parameter exceeds the performance of current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods resulting in the Pearson correlation value of 0.63 and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.85. The proposed approach has surpassed the SOTA methods by almost 4%.
Finally, the benchmarked approach is used to grade the short answer based on rubrics instead of reference answers. The proposed approach evaluates short answers from Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) dataset to provide scores and feedback (formative assessment) based on the rubrics. The average performance of the dataset results in the Pearson correlation value of 0.61 and RMSE of 0.83. Thus, this research has proven that rubrics-based grading achieves formative assessment without compromising performance. In addition, the rubrics have the advantage of generalizability to all answers.
Das Interesse an Virtual Reality (VR) für die Hochschullehre steigt aktuell vermehrt durch die Möglichkeit, logistisch schwierige Aufgaben abzubilden sowie aufgrund positiver Ergebnisse aus Wirksamkeitsstudien. Gleichzeitig fehlt es jedoch an Studien, die immersive VR-Umgebungen, nicht-immersive Desktop-Umgebungen und konventionelle Lernmaterialien gegenüberstellen und lehr-lernmethodische Aspekte evaluieren. Aus diesem Grund beschäftigt sich dieser Beitrag mit der Konzeption und Realisierung einer Lernumgebung für die Hochschullehre, die sowohl mit einem Head Mounted Display (HMD) als auch mittels Desktops genutzt werden kann, sowie deren Evaluation anhand eines experimentellen Gruppendesigns. Die Lernumgebung wurde auf Basis einer eigens entwickelten Softwareplattform erstellt und die Wirksamkeit mithilfe von zwei Experimentalgruppen – VR vs. Desktop-Umgebung – und einer Kontrollgruppe evaluiert und verglichen. In einer Pilotstudie konnten sowohl qualitativ als auch quantitativ positive Einschätzungen der Usability der Lernumgebung in beiden Experimentalgruppen herausgestellt werden. Darüber hinaus zeigten sich positive Effekte auf die kognitive und affektive Wirkung der Lernumgebung im Vergleich zu konventionellen Lernmaterialien. Unterschiede zwischen der Nutzung als VR- oder Desktop-Umgebung zeigen sich auf kognitiver und affektiver Ebene jedoch kaum. Die Analyse von Log-Daten deutet allerdings auf Unterschiede im Lern- und Explorationsverhalten hin.