Workshop On Early Warning Systems

One of the biggest threats today is the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of a novel pathogen or the re-emergence of a known infectious disease that might result in disease outbreaks with great losses of human life and immense global economic consequences. Over the past six decades, most of the emerging infectious disease events in humans have been caused by zoonotic pathogens-those infectious agents that are transmitted from animals to humans. In June 2008, the Institute of Medicine's and National Research Council's Committee on Achieving Sustainable Global Capacity for Surveillance and Response to Emerging Diseases of Zoonotic Origin convened a workshop. This workshop addressed the reasons for the transmission of zoonotic disease and explored the current global capacity for zoonotic disease surveillance.

Online learning has increasingly been viewed as a possible way to remove barriers associated with traditional face-to-face teaching, such as overcrowded classrooms and shortage of certified teachers. While online learning has been recognized as a possible approach to deliver more desirable learning outcomes, close to half of online students drop out as a result of student-related, course-related, and out-of-school-related factors (e.g., poor self-regulation; ineffective teacher-student, student-student, and platform-student interactions; low household income). Many educators have expressed concern over students who unexpectedly begin to struggle and appear to fall off track without apparent reason. A well-implemented early warning system, therefore, can help educators identify students at risk of dropping out and assign and monitor interventions to keep them on track for graduation. Despite the popularity of early warning systems, research on their design and implementation is sparse. Early Warning Systems and Targeted Interventions for Student Success in Online Courses is a cutting-edge research publication that examines current theoretical frameworks, research projects, and empirical studies related to the design, implementation, and evaluation of early warning systems and targeted interventions and discusses their implications for policy and practice. Moreover, this book will review common challenges of early warning systems and dashboard design and will explore design principles and data visualization tools to make data more understandable and, therefore, more actionable. Highlighting a range of topics such as curriculum design, game-based learning, and learning support, it is ideal for academicians, policymakers, administrators, researchers, education professionals, instructional designers, data analysts, and students.

Since the dawn of medical science, people have recognized connections between a change in the weather and the appearance of epidemic disease. With today's technology, some hope that it will be possible to build models for predicting the emergence and spread of many infectious diseases based on climate and weather forecasts. However, separating the effects of climate from other effects presents a tremendous scientific challenge. Can we use climate and weather forecasts to predict infectious disease outbreaks? Can the field of public health advance from "surveillance and response" to "prediction and prevention?" And perhaps the most important question of all: Can we predict how global warming will affect the emergence and transmission of infectious disease agents around the world? Under the Weather evaluates our current understanding of the linkages among climate, ecosystems, and infectious disease; it then goes a step further and outlines the research needed to improve our understanding of these linkages. The book also examines the potential for using climate forecasts and ecological observations to help predict infectious disease outbreaks, identifies the necessary components for an epidemic early warning system, and reviews lessons learned from the use of climate forecasts in other realms of human activity.