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This paper discusses a two-year study at an Australian university in which 154 undergraduate and 51 postgraduate students reflected on their experiences with flexible and personalised assessment where they could choose assessment tasks, submission dates and weightings of their assignments. Through pre- and post-course surveys and a focus group, feelings of empowerment and attitudes towards flexibility were investigated. Students were positive about all aspects of the flexible approach and felt it was beneficial for their learning. Only the postgraduate group showed significant improvement in feelings of empowerment and grades suggesting that more experienced learners may adapt more easily to this model. We argue that empowering learners is not about better grades but about students gaining more input, voice and control in their learning and assessment. Despite the disadvantages of increased workload for teachers and a decision-making burden on students, the potential benefits for students justify consideration of more personalised and flexible assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Ethiopia's planned climate adaptation interventions and the barriers that impede implementation of adaptation policies at the local level by using the case study of Raya Azebo district. Data was collected through reviews of policy documents, focus group discussions with farmers and interviews with relevant government actors. Results indicate that climate change is addressed in various policy documents but there is limited progress in implementation of these policies. The study identified various barriers to climate adaptation policy implementation which included a lack of financial resources, poor coordination among institutional actors and local actors' low technical capacities for addressing climate change. The study contributes to the literature of climate change policy planning and implementation in low-income and lower-middle-income countries and suggests measures to overcome the existing barriers to climate change adaptation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combinatorial vector fields on simplicial complexes introduced by Robin Forman constitute a combinatorial analogue of classical flows. They have found numerous and varied applications in recent years. Yet, their formal relationship to classical dynamical systems has been less clear. In this paper we prove that for every combinatorial vector field on a finite simplicial complex X one can construct a semiflow on the underlying polytope X which exhibits the same dynamics. The equivalence of the dynamical behavior is established in the sense of Conley-Morse graphs and uses a tiling of the topological space X which makes it possible to directly construct isolating blocks for all involved isolated invariant sets based purely on the combinatorial information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]