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This study investigates the dynamic pattern of learners' evaluation of their learning experiences on the MOOC platform at different stages. Data include 364 evaluative comments from the large MOOC in Consecutive Interpreting for a period of 15 weeks. The results of MANOVA test suggest that MOOC learners left significantly more comments on four areas at the later stage compared with those at the early stage: learning resources, learning community, learning opportunity, and student voice. It suggests that MOOC learners at a later stage are looking for a learning environment which supports self-assessment, peer feedback, and coaching to fulfil their personal needs and expectations. Moreover, qualitative thematic analysis suggests that learning resources addresses three areas: the design of the tasks, helpfulness, and diversity of the resources. Learning community largely refers to peer-feedback, co-instructions of peers, and instructors. Learning opportunities refers to the tasks which improve professional knowledge, self-regulated learning strategies, and language proficiency. Last, student voice indicates three types of tensions: the need for pre-existing knowledge to study MOOCs, learners' diversified personal goals and teaching objectives of MOOCs, preferred learning strategies between MOOC designers and learners.

In the built heritage studies, the intricate web of social and selective processes that define heritage is evident. These processes are, in many cases, intertwined with the notion of scale, examplified through the production of heritage sites at the local, national, and transnational scales. While heritage and geography scholars have articulated the role played by scale in heritage-making and argue against a rigid, fixed, and hierarchical understanding of scale, they highlight the constant reproduction of scale. There is, so far, limited explanation of how the perception of scale gets reproduced and how crucial actors manipulate scalar power and resources for heritage making and the reproduction of scale. To fill this gap, this paper delves into mainland China's heritage-making, using the southern Anhui historical villages as an example. Based on intensive 5-month field research, this paper has three findings: 1) The nomination process for a World Heritage Site is notably influenced by politics and selectivity; 2) Diverse stakeholders are pivotal in shaping heritage narratives; 3) Individual contributions to heritage creation directly interact with, and subsequently reshape, 'scale', an entity that is simultaneously discursive and tangible. By integrating the notion of 'scale' into heritage discussions, we illuminate two concurrent processes: creating hierarchies through rule assimilation by interpreting the UNESCO standard internally and evolving socio-spatial dynamics via the manifestation of individual agency with resource manipulation, scale jumping, and reproduction of scale. This approach aligns with the material orientation in human geography and repositions 'scale'. Here, it's not just an epistemological framework but also a tangible force that steers individual perceptions and actions and yields measurable material impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently the Chinese government has been actively collaborating with nonprofit nongovernmental organizations to provide social welfare services to older adults at the community level. The role played by NGOs in facilitating governance has only recently gained attention in the literature on Chinese NGOs and urban governance. Addressing this gap, the paper advances geographers' understanding of State–NGO collaborations in facilitating urban governance in the Chinese context using fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai on the provision of community eldercare services as an example. It also explains the political control of these NGOs and their changing role in the eldercare market. We argue that collaborations between the state and NGOs in China have gradually transferred eldercare services to the NGOs, and led to a fragmented welfare system, which, as a consequence, has facilitated entrepreneurial urban governance. The paper sheds light on community-based organizations, their collaboration with local governments, and how they have become not only welfare providers but a significant site for social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically expanded the role of algorithmic governance in everyday mobility. In China, urban and provincial governments have introduced health codes app as a national contract tracing and quarantine enforcement method to restrict the movements of "risky" individuals through malls, subways, railways, as well as between regions. Yet the health codes have been implemented with uneven efficacy and unexpected consequences. Drawing on glitch politics, we read these unintended consequences as "bugs" emerging from the introduction of platform-based management into everyday life. These bugs mediated individuals' lived experiences of the digital app and the hybrid space constituted by population governance, individual digital navigation, and technology. Drawing on a database of posts scraped from Zhihu, a popular Chinese question-and-answer site, we examine three dimensions of the bug: the algorithmic bug, the territorial bug, and the corporeal bug. This paper sheds light on the significance of end-user experiences in digital infrastructure and contributes to our understanding of the digital geographies of bugs in algorithmic governance and platform urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of China's rapid urbanization, rural places are brought into urban areas, forming semi-urbanization. These semi-urbanized sites suggest a dual urban–rural structure in their form and management. With the slowing down of urbanization, the Chinese government adopted heritage tourism to boost the local economy. Local historic buildings and cultural resources were regenerated and restored in this process. This paper aims at examining the role of heritage tourism in blurring the boundary of rurality and urbanity, boosting local economy, and revitalizing the areas with cultural-led development. In this paper, we analyzed the Huangpu Ancient Village's regeneration process. We argue that the Huangpu Ancient Village integrates local historical and cultural resources to boost the local economy, simultaneously adopting urban renewal and rural revival strategies. This paper contributes to the body of literature addressing villages in urban areas, breaking the duality of urbanity and rurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some researches have shown the associations between air pollution and hospital-based emergency department visits, while the evidence about the acute effects of air pollution on emergency ambulance dispatches for the whole population is rarely available, especially on an hourly time scale. This paper aimed to investigate the effects of hourly concentrations of ambient air pollution on hourly number of ambulance emergency call-outs (AECOs) in Shenzhen, China. AECO data were collected from Shenzhen Emergency Center from January 2013 to December 2016. A time-stratified case-crossover design with conditional Poisson regression was performed to fit the relationship between hourly air pollution and AECOs. The distributed lag model was applied to determine lag structure of the effects of air pollutants. There were a total of 502,862 AECOs during the study period. The significant detrimental effects of SO2, PM2.5, and PM10 appeared immediately with a following harvesting effect after 5 h and the effects lasted for about 96 h. The cumulative effect estimates of four pollutants over 0–96 h were 13.99% (95% CI 7.52–20.85%), 2.07% (95% CI 0.72–3.43%), 1.20% (95% CI 0.54–1.87%), and 2.46% (95% CI 1.63–3.29%), respectively. We did not observe significant effects of O3. This population-based study quantifies the adverse effects of air pollution on ambulance dispatches and provides evidence of the lag structure of the effects on an hourly time scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transnational adoption process includes a child assessment programme that evaluates children's mental and physical health to select and produce adoptable children. Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2015 and 2016, this paper describes in detail this assessment programme, which compares children to their global peers. Adoption agencies and Chinese social welfare institutions rank children by their likelihood of being adopted. The closer a child is to what is considered normal, the easier it will be for the child to be adopted. This socially and spatially shifting ranking of the children's normality enables the flow of children from societies that exclude children from families to societies that re‐include them in families. In addition to ranking the children, the process also involves further normalising them. This paper contributes to the geography of adoption by focusing on the normalisation process implemented to produce adoptable children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With enhanced economic development and population growth in recent years, total water consumption has increased significantly around the world. As the most populated and most rapidly developing country in the world, one of the major challenges for the Chinese government is to guarantee a continuous water supply to improve the livelihood of the growing population and maintain the fast development of the economy. An ever-increasing trend of water consumption has led to the construction of hydraulic structures and degradation of the ecosystem in China. Through the analysis of water consumption and water-use efficiency around the world, this study concluded that water demand management is the only option to assure a continuous supply of water to a growing population and developing economy. In this paper, water supply and demand of China over the time period 1980-2009 are analyzed to formulate water demand management strategies for a sustainable water supply. The study proposes that a water demand management strategy, based on demand control and quota management, could be a better option for sustainable water management in China. An example of the Haihe River Basin is provided to show the success of water demand management using total demand control and quota management. It can be expected that through the encouragement of a water conserving society, by water demand management, it is possible to harmonize the relationship among water, the environment, ecosystems, and human beings in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longer ambulance response time (ART) delaying treatment would worsen conditions of seriously ill or injured patients, but limited evidence is available on the effects of weather factors on ART. This study aims to assess precipitation- and temperature-ART associations and their potential lagged effects using a novel modeling strategy. Based on 779,156 emergency records during 2010–2016 from the whole population in Shenzhen, China, we creatively combined quantile regression with distributed-lag nonlinear models to examine the non-linear and lagged effects of hourly precipitation and temperature on ART at the 50th and 90th percentiles. A linear precipitation-ART association with a delay of 9.01 (95%CI, 7.82–10.20) seconds at median ART for a 1 mm increase in hourly precipitation, and the effects lasted for 5 h with the greatest effect at the current hour. A two linear thresholds temperature-ART association revealed 1 °C decrease below 19 °C caused 1.68 (95%CI, 0.92–2.44) seconds delay in total ART over lag 0–7 h, and 1 °C increase above 24 °C caused 2.44 (95%CI, 1.55–3.33) seconds delay. The hourly call volumes exceeding 54 calls caused 8.79 (95%CI, 8.71–8.86) seconds delay in total ART for 1 more call, but not affected the effects of weather factors. The internal ART suffered more from the hourly call volumes, while the external ART suffered more from precipitation and temperature. The effects were apparently greater on ART at the 90th percentile than median. Precipitation and temperature are independent risk factors for ambulance services performance, and their lagged effects are notable. The external ART and patients with long ART are vulnerable. More attention should be paid to weather and ART, and these findings may have implications for effective policies to reduce ART to protect public health. Image 1 • Evidence about the effects of weather factors on ART are limited, particularly no hourly data is available. • A novel modeling strategy was developed to examine the effects of hourly precipitation and temperature on ART. • A linear precipitation-ART association was observed with acute effects lasting for 5 h. • A U-shaped temperature-ART association implied cold and hot temperature delayed ART. • 1 more call above 54 ambulance emergency calls per hour caused a delay of 8.79 s in ART. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]