With the rapid changes in globalization and technology advancement, self-directed learning is argued repeatedly as a key competency needed to survive twenty-first century. In August 2019, Taiwan Ministry of Education implemented new Curriculum Guidelines for 12-Year Basic Education. Being Taiwan’s first official curriculum that promoted learning, this study contributed emerging knowledge how in...

INTRODUCTION Self-directed learning has been recommended as a promising methodology for lifelong learning in medicine. However, the concept of self-directed learning continues to be elusive, with students and educators finding difficulty in defining it and agreeing on its worth. METHODS In this paper we review the literature of self-directed learning in health professions education and presen...

Efficient exploration is recognized as a key difficulty in reinforcement learning. We consider an episodic undiscounted MDP where the goal is to minimize the sum of regrets over different episodes. Classical methods are either based on optimism in the face of uncertainty or on probability matching. In this project we explore an approach that aims at quantifying the cost of exploration while rem...

Learning behaviour of artificial agents is commonly studied in the framework of Reinforcement Learning. Reinforcement Learning gained increasing popularity in the past years. This is partially due to developments that enabled the possibility to employ complex function approximators, such as deep networks, in combination with the framework. Two of the core challenges in Reinforcement Learning ar...

In the June 2014 issue, Premkumar et al. presented a fascinating account of self-directed learning scores in dental students.1 Their account is comprehensive, and the take-home message is clear: students’ self-directed learning scores fall during their predoctoral years. Like all research, their account begs the question as to what, if anything, can be done about this. In some ways, it may not ...

Art and science of dentistry is constantly changing, broadening the knowledge of etiopathogenesis of oral diseases, development of new diagnostic tools and introducing new therapeutic modalities. In these days of competition and evidence based practice it becomes mandatory for a clinician to keep abreast with new developments to continue in the profession. This calls for lifelong learning. To m...