Adolescent obesity is rising in South Africa, driven by poor diet and inactivity. Mobile health (mHealth) offers a promising way to reach youth with messages on nutrition and physical activity, yet context-specific, evidence-based interventions remain limited across Africa. This study aimed to explore the local context, engage school stakeholders, and co-develop culturally relevant digital content to support adolescent obesity prevention.

Paper presented at the U.S. Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium, Dakar, Senegal, 2-4 February

If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact the Research Outputs curators at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za

Hybrid work arrangements are on the increase, and digital technology for collaboration is shaping workplaces. This paper examines the transformative effects of hybrid workplaces on organizational culture and their influence on organizational silos among knowledge workers. Two large knowledge-intensive firms served as the case organizations for this qualitative study. The data collected consists of interviews and observations. The findings reveal the most impacted layer of organizational culture, illustrating how communication and collaboration for knowledge workers became confined to smaller teams, leading to the development of new silos in hybrid workplaces. The findings also highlight the needed behavioral changes and mindset for virtual collaboration, and the role of organizational leaders in facilitating these changes in an evolved workplace.

Co-hosted and organized by the GYA, the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad, the 2025 GYA International Conference will take place in-person from 10 - 13 June 2025. This year’s conference will focus on the heme, “Confluence of Visionaries: Empowering Science for Global Change,” which aligns with the many facets of the city of Hyderabad: an academic, IT, and pharmaceutical hub. The Conference aims to serve as a platform for young and visionary minds from diverse fields and geographical locations to converge, share insights, and explore strategies for harnessing the power of science to drive positive global transformations. In the spirit of collaboration and innovation, the conference will empower young scientists to address pressing global challenges, such as climate change, public health, technology advancement, and sustainable development.Paper presented at the GYA Annual General Meeting (AGM) and International Conference of Young Scientists “Confluence of Visionaries: Empowering Science for Global Change”, 10-13 June, Hyderabad, India

If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact the Research Outputs curators at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za

The benefits of teacher-facing dashboards are incontestable, yet their evidence is finite in terms of long-term use, meaningful usability, and maturity level. Thus, this paper uses design science research and critical theory to design and develop TEADASH to support teachers in making decisions on teaching and learning. Three cycles of design science research and multiple small loops were implemented to develop the dashboard. The tool was then deployed and evaluated in real time with the authentic courses. Five courses from two Swedish universities were included in this study. The co-design with teachers is crucial to the applicability of this dashboard, while letting teachers use the tool during their courses is more important to help them to recognize the features they actually use and the tool’s usefulness for their teaching practices. TEADASH can address the prior matters, align with the learning design, and meet teachers’ needs. The technical and co-design aspects, as well as the advantages and challenges of applying TEADASH in practice, are also discussed here.

Open Educational Resources are learning, teaching, and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation, and redistribution by others (UNESCO). Increasing the use of OER worldwide can be one of many steps toward reaching the United Nations Agenda 2030 sustainability goals (SDG), especially SDG 4 Quality Education, which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

The UNESCO OER recommendations from 2020 provide clear goals and aims for OER, but how are they being implemented in higher education in Sweden? Specifically, how well are teachers and students aware of and how are they using OER, specifically open textbooks? This paper presents the use and needs of OER as well as current OER guidelines at University West in Sweden and investigates teachers’ and students' perceptions and experiences of open educational resources (OER) at University West, focusing on open textbooks. The method of the intervention was student and teacher surveys, both pre- and post-pandemic. The pre-pandemic surveys were sent out in April 2020 and had 79 student respondents and 82 teacher respondents. The post-pandemic surveys were sent out in June 2022 and had 83 student respondents and 76 teacher respondents.

The aggregated results show that there were no significant differences in the use of OER and open textbooks due to the pandemic both for students and teachers. The current use of OER and open textbooks was limited and the primary motivations for using OER and open textbooks were economy, social justice, and adaptability with varying priorities among students and teachers. Additionally, OER and open textbooks are currently used marginally at University West but there is interest to increase the use of OER and student co-creation due to the three primary motivators. These preliminary results provide valuable insights regarding the key factors for increasing the use of OER and open textbooks in higher education to help achieve the UNESCO OER 2020 goals and the United Nations Agenda 2030 SDG goals, especially SDG 4 Quality Education.

Child and adolescent overweight is a growing public health problem globally. Europe and low and middle-income (LMIC) countries in Sub-Saharan Africa provide sufficiently suitable populations to learn from with respect to the potential for mobile health (mHealth) interventions in this area of research. The aim of this paper is to identify mHealth interventions on prevention and treatment of childhood and adolescent obesity in Sub-Saharan Africa and Sweden and report on their effects, in order to inform future research in this area. A search of peer-reviewed publications was performed using PubMed, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, and Scopus. The search included all articles published up to August 2019. The search strings consisted of MeSH terms related to mHealth, overweight or obesity, children, adolescents or youth and individual countries in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, a combination of free-text words; mobile phone, physical activity, exercise, diet, weight, BMI, and healthy eating was also used. Seven studies were reported from Europe and no eligible studies from Sub-Saharan Africa. The results of this narrative review indicate a lack of research in the development and testing of mHealth interventions for childhood and adolescent obesity. There is a need for an evidence base of mHealth interventions that are both relevant and appropriate in order to stem the epidemic of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents in these countries. Uptake of such interventions is likely to be high as there is high penetrance of mobile phone technology amongst adolescents, even within poor communities in Africa.

Background:Children with long-term illnesses frequently experience symptoms that could negatively affect their daily lives. These symptoms are often underreported in health care. Despite a large number of mobile health (mHealth) tools, few are based on a theoretical framework or supported by scientific knowledge. Incorporating universal design when developing a product can promote accessibility and facilitate person-centered communication.

Objective: The aim of this study is to identify the symptom-reporting needs of children with cancer and congenital heart defects that could be satisfied by using a mobile app. Another aim is to evaluate how the child might interact with the app by considering universal design principles and to identify parents’ views and health care professionals’ expectations and requirements for an mHealth tool.

Methods: User-centered design is an iterative process that focuses on an understanding of the users. The adapted user-centered design process includes 2 phases with 4 stages. Phase 1 involved interviews with 7 children with long-term illnesses, 8 parents, and 19 health care professionals to determine their needs and wishes for support; a workshop with 19 researchers to deepen our understanding of the needs; and a workshop with developers to establish a preliminary tool to further investigate needs and behaviors. Phase 2 involved interviews with 10 children with long-term illnesses, 9 parents, and 21 health care professionals to evaluate the mock-up (prototype) of the mHealth tool. Data were synthesized using the interpretive description technique.

Results:A total of 4 aspects of needs emerged from the synthesis of the data, as follows: different perspectives on provided and perceived support; the need for an easy-to-use, non–clinic-based tool to self-report symptoms and to facilitate communication; the need for safety by being in control and reaching the child’s voice; and a way of mapping the illness journey to facilitate recall and improve diagnostics. The children with long-term illnesses expressed a need to not only communicate about pain but also communicate about anxiety, fatigue, fear, and nausea.

Conclusions: The findings of this study indicated that the PicPecc (Pictorial Support in Person-Centered Care for Children) app is a potential solution for providing communicative support to children with long-term illnesses dealing with multiple symptoms and conditions. The interview data also highlighted symptoms that are at risk of being overlooked if they are not included in the mobile app. Further studies are needed to include usability testing and evaluation in hospitals and home care settings.

This paper explores the results and perceived effects from an IT project management course given in Informatics at University West in Sweden. The 10-week course requires students to manage and execute real-world projects as a form of work integrated learning (WIL). For the past three years, the course has been performed in cooperation with the Innovatum Startup program offered by the Innovatum Science Center in Trollhättan, Sweden. Each year Innovatum Startup hosts a match making session where the startup companies present their projects and propose concrete projects that the university students can choose as their real-world project. This paper presents the results regarding the startups' and students' satisfaction with the course as well as the outcomes of the students' work for the startups and the effects on the students' future employability, networking and entrepreneurship. The results are based on surveys given to the participating students and startup companies. The findings show a high level of student and startup satisfaction with the WIL collaboration and the findings reaffirm similar research that WIL courses benefit student employability and networking. However, the findings do not show a significant impact on entrepreneurship.

This paper concerns open education (OER) resources, and more specifically the process of publishing OER material to make it easier to find on the web. The overarching goals are to improve the creation and discovery of OER material for workplace learning as well as strive towards UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. As we see it, there are two key challenges. The first challenge regards the content creation and curation side; i.e. the process of making OER material available to the general public, how to maintain the resource and how to get feedback on it. The second challenge regards discovery i.e. for OER consumers to easily find OER material and discern its usefulness in their specific learning context. We are in the process of developing a web based system that aids content creators in publishing and maintaining their OER material. The system helps the content creator by generating semantic metadata about the resource based on the Dublin Core system and creates a package of the material itself along with said metadata in a search engine optimized HTML5 file, ready for publishing on a web server or a video streaming site like YouTube, or other media sharing sites. This approach primarily utilizes common search engines to find the material, thus making the OER material decentralized and not necessarily specific to a specific OER repository. The metadata created by the system does, however, enable developers to create systems specialized in collecting and aggregating OER material, further enhancing the capability of the decentralized ecosystem of OER resources to be used by learning management systems. The key contribution is a suggestion as to how to automatically generate and use an OERID so that all resources can be discovered, curated, and reused.