Digital Education Strategy

This chapter analyzes and discusses key strategies for digital education. The chapter begins by examining and defining several key concepts, including global citizenship, digital citizenship, computational thinking, informational thinking, and systemic thinking. Next, the chapter analyzes the role of leadership in the age of digitalization and advocates for panoramic leadership. The chapter then discusses strategies and tools for teaching the digital humanities and compares STEM-based education with STEAM-based education. The virtual classroom is then analyzed, followed by a discussion of why Finnish schools excel in digital education. The chapter concludes by analyzing and discussing the architecture for digital schools and universities.

Understanding Pandemics Such as COVID-19 through the Lenses of the “One Health” Approach

This study aims to contribute to research on systemic thinking in biology education, particularly how to best equip pre-service teachers to introduce health problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic using the “One Health” approach. We attempt to explore to what extent a group of pre-service teachers identify our lifestyle and relationships with nature as factors that contribute to the emergence of future pandemics. The research questions are as follows: (1) What dimensions of the One Health approach did the students identify as potential causes that can produce and prevent future pandemics such as the COVID-19 disease? (2) To what extent did the students show a systemic view aligned to the One Health approach? The participants were 43 pre-service elementary teachers working on a set of activities about the COVID-19 pandemic, in which they were asked about the potential causes of and ways to prevent future pandemics. Content analysis of individual written responses is applied for addressing the research questions, focusing on the dimensions of the One Health approach and the level of system thinking reflected. Most participants focused on the human dimension and a few mentioned environmental and animal dimensions, which points to the need to integrate the One Health notion into teacher training.

From Lean Production to Lean 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review with a Historical Perspective

Over recent decades, the increasing competitiveness of markets has propagated the term “lean” to describe the management concept for improving productivity, quality, and lead time in industrial as well as services operations. Its overuse and linkage to different specifiers (surnames) have created confusion and misunderstanding as the term approximates pragmatic ambiguity. Through a systematic literature review, this study takes a historical perspective to analyze 4962 papers and 20 seminal books in order to clarify the origin, evolution, and diversification of the lean concept. Our main contribution lies in identifying 17 specifiers for the term “lean” and proposing four mechanisms to explain this diversification. Our research results are useful to both academics and practitioners to return to the Lean origins in order to create new research areas and conduct organizational transformations based on solid concepts. We conclude that the use of “lean” as a systemic thinking is likely to be further extended to new research fields.

Exploring mechanisms for systemic thinking in decision-making through three country applications of SDG Synergies

Increased systems thinking capacity—that is, the capacity to consider systemic effects of policies and actions—is necessary for translating knowledge on Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) interactions into practice. Various models and tools that seek to support more evidence-based policy-making have been developed with the purpose of exploring system effects across SDGs. However, these often lack integration of behavioral aspects and contextual factors that influence the decision-making process. We analyze three applications of a decision-support approach called SDG Synergies, which aims at building capacity in systems thinking among decision-makers and implementing agencies. Our objective is to explore how behavior and context influences whether and how knowledge is taken up and acted upon when making decisions. Drawing on empirical material from Mongolia, Colombia, and Sri Lanka, we identify three sets of mechanisms that appear important for enabling more systemic thinking: system boundaries (time, scale, and space), rules of engagement (ownership, representation, and purpose), and biases (confirmation biases and participation biases). Results highlight some key challenges for systemic thinking that merit further attention in future applications, including the importance of localizing SDGs and incorporating this knowledge to national-level assessments, an unwillingness of stakeholders to acknowledge trade-offs, the challenge of addressing transformational as opposed to incremental change, and striking a balance between the flexibility of the approach vis-à-vis scientific robustness.

Global Terrorism as a Virus

Two decades after the twin towers collapsed, the identification of global terrorism still remains an open question for everyone. However, since 9/11, the trope of the virus entered the scholarly discourses as well as the sociopolitical debate. This investigation is aimed at moving from the metaphor of terrorism as a virus to the virus-like pathogenic processes that affect terror threats. The proposal is to highlight the fluid identity of a main viral phenomenon of evildoing, according to a strict dialogue with the microbiological domain. New lenses are needed. As the author argues, systemic thinking better suits this subject matter than traditional linear thinking. The author will seek to highlight the development of global terrorism in terms of the biological mechanism of the virus's life (pathogenesis). Finally, it will be assumed that through the subject matter of global threat philosophy can improve the understanding of a dynamic principle of identity suitable to living entities/open systems.

Applying a System Dynamics Approach for the Pharmaceutical Industry: Simulation and Optimization of the Quality Control Process

As countries interact more and more, technology gains a decisive role in facilitating today’s increased need for interconnection. At the same time, systems, becoming more advanced as technology progresses, feed each other and can produce highly complex and unpredictable results. However, with this ever-increasing need for interconnected operations, complex problems arise that need to be effectively tackled. This need extends far beyond the scientific and mechanical fields, covering every aspect of life. Systemic Thinking Philosophy and the System Dynamics methodology now seem to be more relevant than ever and their practical implementation in real-life industrial cases has started to become a trend. Companies that decide to implement such approaches can achieve significant improvements to the effectiveness of their operations and gain a competitive advantage. This research, influenced by the Systemic Thinking Philosophy, applies a System Dynamics approach in practice by improving the quality control process of a pharmaceutical company. The process is modeled, simulated, analyzed, and improvements are performed to achieve more effective and efficient operations. The results show that all these steps led to a successful identification and optimization of the critical factors, and a significant process improvement was achieved.

Model dialogues are innovative means of forming functional and systemic thinking of students

Since 2020, the coronavirus infection has covered the entire globe. Virologists and epidemiologists find it difficult to make predictions about the possibility of its complete eradication. This means an increase in the probability of the transition of educational and pedagogical processes mainly to distance education. The necessity of developing appropriate effective pedagogical technologies is actualized. This is facilitated by the current trend of "digitalization" of society, equipping educational institutions with information technology, and all students with personal computers. The national intellectual cores that make up the country's immune system-culture, science, education, public administration – are subjected to total information and network influence. The most vulnerable category is young people who are immersed in the information and digital web through all sorts of gadgets, who do not have reliable criteria for separating the grains from the chaff. The human brain is a kind of biological computer, a body of «local» self-government, designed to provide intellectual immunity, functions of self-analysis, self-criticism, self-assessment, self-organization, self-regulation, etc. Since a person is born without «software», the main task of all educational institutions is to provide students with cultural (software) means of effective correct independent thinking. In the conditions of market uncertainty, the coronavirus pandemic, the absence of an officially articulated national idea, national interests and ideology in Kazakhstan, the need to shift the focus of educational policy in the country from subject-programmed training to the cultivation of abilities for reflexive, functional-system thinking and interaction is becoming more and more clearly realized. From the methodological point of view, problems exist only in thinking and are associated with the lack of means of organized thinking, the corresponding abilities of a person to apply these means. Given the forced transition to remote, distance education, the nearest problem that needs to be resolved is the lack of effective pedagogical means for forming students' abilities for reflexive, functional-systemic thinking and interaction. Purpose is substantiation and development of author's model dialogues that indirectly contribute to the formation of students' abilities for reflexive, functional-system thinking and interaction in the conditions of distance education. Methods: model dialogues constructed using the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete or the method of dialectical deduction and the method of converting concrete images of objects based on their abstract foundations. The given samples of the author's model dialogues demonstrate an innovative way of cultivating reflexive analytical, pedagogical and managerial abilities of students with different focuses.

Exploration and Practical Teaching Improvement of “Game Simulation & Modeling” Course

Due to long-term lack of comprehensive practice platform in simulation courses, students suffer from the challenges of engineering ability and systemic thinking training restrictions, “teaching” and “learning” separation, etc. To solve those problems, our teaching group created a simulation competition platform independently for theoretical and practical teaching of “Game Simulation & Modeling” course. The introduction of competition platform has played a good role in stimulating students’ learning motivation, training systemic simulation knowledge points and engineering ability, promoting theoretical and practical teaching, and enriching teaching materials through students’ feedback and practice accumulation.

A.I.R.: From Radical Individuality to Connected Subjectivity

Humans are part of an interlinked world crossed by overlapping flows: substances, beings and information. The major global events that have unfolded throughout 2020 have profoundly altered the social system, revealing deep structural weak spots, and pushed its resilience to the limit, nearly causing its suffocation. This context has called into question our anthropocentric mindset and has led us to critically revise how we think about the (eco)systems we are part of, how we act within them, what is our agency to drive meaningful shifts, and with which tools we can do so. For nine months during which life and art became part of a single space, we, three artists and designers in collaboration with a diverse team of researchers, explored the way in which our individual and collective agency is affected by how close – both emotionally and physically – we feel to others, whether human or not. By navigating through art and design approaches, we imagined perspectives to defy our dualist, linear and Cartesian point of view to question how, as our system regains its speed, we can move towards a more connected sense of being. A systemic thinking toolkit, dozens of conversations, a breathing body, a poem and a visual essay have unfolded during this time, giving shape to the project A.I.R. Air[noun, uncountable], the mixture of gases we breathe; air[noun, uncountable], the space that circulates everything; but also A.I.R., an acronym for “artists in residency”, or more accurately, artists in remoteness. Air that we have lacked too often during these nine months. Air that can be the deepest kind of embrace, in these times pierced by radical forms of isolation. We start weaving our ideas around the notions of systems, agency and closeness by asking: how close do you feel?