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The rapid expansion of online education in the 21st century, driven by technological advancements and the COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted the critical role of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in higher education. This study aims to investigate student satisfaction with the instructional design of MOOCs at a private university in Vietnam.

This mixed-methods research integrates quantitative data from a survey of 225 students with qualitative insights from interviews with 10 students. The study examines key determinants of student satisfaction, including course content, instructional methodologies, assessment systems, engagement in discussion forums and the overall online learning environment.

The findings reveal high levels of student satisfaction with the quality of course materials, the flexibility of the platform and the usability of the interface. However, areas of dissatisfaction include limited interactive engagement, inadequate motivational elements, suboptimal assessment strategies and insufficient staff support. The study underscores the need for comprehensive instructor evaluations, increased student-instructor interactions, improved plagiarism detection mechanisms and timely academic support to enhance the instructional design and educational outcomes of MOOCs.

This study provides a nuanced understanding of student satisfaction with MOOCs, specifically within the context of a private university in Vietnam. By integrating both quantitative and qualitative data, the research offers valuable insights into specific elements that contribute to or detract from learner satisfaction. These findings can inform practical enhancements in MOOC design and delivery, ultimately aiming to improve educational outcomes in online learning environments.

Addressing the urgent issue of climate change and its impact on society requires immediate attention and innovative solutions. This chapter explores research that examines previous studies about the strategies companies use in their human resources (HR) departments to lessen the impact of climate change and support good social results.

This section conducted a thorough search of academic literature to find relevant studies on the connection between HR strategies, addressing climate change, and social impact. The inclusion criteria for this research targeted empirical studies on the relationship between HR practices and environmental and social outcomes. It employed particular keywords such as well-known academic databases.

This review discusses the important influence of HR strategies in addressing climate change and promoting positive social effects in companies. It evaluates successful HR practices that specifically endorse environmental and social goals through a comprehensive analysis of academic studies. The results offer useful knowledge for HR professionals and business leaders looking to align their HR strategies with climate change.

The findings of this chapter can benefit a diverse audience such as scholars who deal with human resource management, knowledge management and organizational innovation, HR personnel, business stakeholders and the employees.

This review offers a novel viewpoint by exploring the less-studied area of HR's potential to drive positive environmental and social changes. While past research has acknowledged HR's significance, this review goes further by analysing the specific HR approaches that have been successful in tackling climate change and enhancing social welfare.

This study aims to develop an improved understanding of the formation of citizens' purchase intention to increase the adoption of prefabricated housing (PH).

An integrative model of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and norm activation model (NAM) was proposed based on previous studies. To verify the conceptual model, an analysis was conducted after data collection from a questionnaire survey. Lastly, findings were presented by explaining the formation of purchase intention in the egoistic and altruistic contexts. Practical implications were likewise discussed.

Findings manifest that citizens' purchase intention is influenced by egoistic and altruistic cognitions. An effective strategy is to show citizens the pro-environmental features of PH to promote its adoption because they value the environmental performance of housing. Meanwhile, consumers' social fitness also plays an essential role in decision-making, and the dual contradiction in the PH market is revealed.

This study extends the knowledge of psychological decision-making theories in the field of purchase intention toward PH by proposing an integrative framework of TPB and NAM. Results indicate a systematic and comprehensive understanding of consumers' decision-making in the PH domain. Moreover, results of this research contribute to specifying and refining the applicable contexts of TPB and NAM by adding two antecedents: subjective knowledge and environmental concern. This research contributes to the literature by being one of the first to investigate purchase intention toward a high-cost product with invisible technological innovation.

This study aims to investigate whether banks’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities impact their profitability and stability. The authors also explore whether banking industry competition and the country’s regulatory quality moderate the impact of banks’ ESG on their profitability and stability.

The sample includes data from 46 banks in 11 Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) from 2010 to 2020. The authors have used the generalized method of moments (GMM) as the primary estimation model, with robustness tests to validate research findings.

The results show that neither ESG nor its components impact bank profitability. Instead, ESG and its social component decrease bank stability. The findings neither support the stakeholder theory nor the risk-management view, which proposes that ESG activities improve financial performance and reduce unnecessary risks. However, an increase in market power (reduced competition) frees resources for banks, such that they focus more on ESG activities, which improves profitability, albeit at reduced stability levels. This finding supports the competition-related differentiation hypothesis. Finally, a country’s regulatory quality change does not influence bank ESG to impact its profitability or stability. This finding does not support the institutions-ESG proposition.

This study has several limitations. First, constrained by data availability, the authors could not examine Islamic banks in OIC countries. Examining the ESG outcomes in Islamic banks would be interesting based on Islamic ethics and corporate social responsibility perspectives. The data set could also be more recent so that the differential impact of COVID-19 on bank ESG and financial performance could be estimated. The coverage of OIC countries was limited in our sample; this could be improved in future research.

Banks should evaluate the focus and scope of their ESG activities, communicate their long-term strategic benefits with stakeholders and align ESG with their strategy and business model to offer innovative ESG-based products. They should also recalibrate ESG in their risk management framework to catalyse stability and stakeholders’ trust. Policymakers should control the level of competition so banks can foster ESG without sacrificing financial performance. Also, banks should be given regulatory incentives so ESG becomes integral to bank growth, direction and stability.

ESG should be part of banks’ strategy and business model, to maximize its benefits for stakeholders, while maintaining competition and providing regulatory incentives.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the influence of bank ESG activities on their profitability and stability in OIC countries. The authors also extend the theoretical literature by connecting competition and regulatory quality to ESG-led financial performance.

This study purposes a model based on competitive advantage theory, social identity theory and signaling theory that explores the relationship between GHRM and employer branding mediated by corporate environmental sustainability and organizational safety climate and employees experience as a moderator.

Data were gathered using a survey questionnaire from 329 employees working in this sector. Structural Equational Modeling was employed for data analysis through Smart PLS.

Results confirm that GHRM has a positive influence on corporate environmental sustainability and corporate environmental sustainability has a positive influence on organizational safety climate. Further, the results confirm that the organizational safety climate has a positive influence on employer branding. The results of partial least squares multi-group analysis show that difference between job experience influences employer branding. The results also lend support to the mediating effects of corporate environmental sustainability between GHRM and organizational safety climate, and the mediating effect of organizational safety climate between GHRM and employer branding.

The findings of the study guide policymakers and management of the textile industry to emphasize GHRM in order to make a working climate clean and safe. This working environment will be their competitive edge and a source of their organization branding.

HR literature has largely overlooked the physical work environment, instead focusing on psychological safety, for example (job stress, emotional exhaustion). This study presents a model demonstrating that a green work environment, fostered through GHRM practices enhances employer branding.

This paper aims to investigate the sentiment connectedness among 10 European stock markets between January 2020 and July 2022, associating such connectedness with the level of the geopolitical risk index.

For this purpose, a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive connectedness framework is used.

Results show a high degree of sentiment connectedness. Overall, the sentiments of Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Italy are net transmitters of shocks while those of Poland, Sweden, Norway and Romania are net receivers. Additional evidence indicates that when geopolitical risks increase, the sentiment connectedness tends to decrease. However, the reverse holds under extremely high levels of geopolitical risks.

Overall, this study provides some significant contributions to the literature. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first few studies to examine the dynamic connectedness among stock market sentiment across countries. This issue needs special consideration for European countries because of their close geographical distance and strong integration due to the European Union’s co-development strategies. Second, the association of sentiment connectedness with geopolitical risk is examined for the first time. This is even more meaningful in the context of growing geopolitical risks stemming from the Ukraine war, which could affect international financial markets.

Considering the influence of the bank’s business model, this study aims to explore the drivers of liquidity risk in the dual banking sector of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) using the two new liquidity requirements of Basel III, Net Stable Funding Ratio and Liquidity Coverage Ratio, as indicators of liquidity risk.

For 61 GCC banks between 2018 and 2022, this study applies the random effects model with an interaction dummy variable technique.

Islamic banks in the GCC region tend to have a significantly lower level of Basel III liquidity requirements, meaning that they are struggling to meet the new Basel III liquidity requirements as they lack an adequate liquidity risk management framework. The liquidity of GCC banks decreases with size; this relationship is linear for conventional GCC banks but not linear for Islamic banks. Finally, the COVID-19 epidemic has exacerbated liquidity risk for GCC banks, with Islamic banks appearing to be the most impacted. The findings are robust to alternative variable selections and estimation techniques.

The findings provide useful insights to improve liquidity risk management practices in the GCC banking system, especially for Islamic banks. Targeted reforms may be needed to further develop Islamic banks’ liquidity tools and optimize their ability to withstand macroeconomic and systemic shocks.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no single study considers the new Basel III metrics for bank liquidity or explicitly compares a wide range of liquidity factors for conventional and Islamic banks in the GCC region.

This study explores the intricate relationship between social media communication, consumer attitude and purchase intention within the context of lifestyle category products. With the rapid proliferation of social media platforms, businesses have turned to these platforms to connect with consumers and influence their purchasing decisions. This study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of how social media communication strategies impact consumer attitudes and, in turn, influence purchase intentions.

The study employs partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the data collected from a sample of consumers.

The results of this study present that lack of visibility (LV), low-efficiency levels (LEL) and unpredictable elements (UE) are ranked as the top three major risk hurdles whereas real-time information on a package’s location (LV1), putting a GPS tracking system to track last-mile journey (OT3) and users wants on time location of their package (LV2) are ranked as top three most significant criteria affecting the practices of modern last-mile logistics in e-commerce businesses.

The results of this study contribute to our understanding of how social media influences consumer behavior in the lifestyle product sector, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms that drive consumer purchasing decisions.

By constructing and testing experimentally a research model that reveals a thorough analysis of pertinent literature and identifies multiple important elements influencing consumer behavior in the lifestyle category, this paper adds to the body of knowledge on marketing. Practical ramifications for lifestyle firms are examined, along with suggestions for improving their social media tactics, in light of the findings.

In the context of digitalizing the supply chain of different sectors, the blockchain technology (BT) is emerged and becomes one of the most interesting and debated research topics. A few years ago, this technology was implemented for the first time in the financial sector, which is currently extended to be used in many other areas, mainly the health-care sector. The success of this technology stems from its ability to enhance the performance, security, consistency of sharing medical data within the whole system and the analysis of medical records. Technically, the BT is defined as a decentralized digital ledger that records transactions between the stakeholders in a supply chain. Thus, they could gain better control and find severe mistakes and the unsafe ones in the medical field. The purpose of this paper is to address a preliminary study of the BT adoption in a real pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) of the Tunisian case.

Indeed, the authors propose an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) combined with the cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis. This methodology is known as an effective one used to identify the criteria that influence the implementation of the BT, analyze the relationships between them and delighting the most impactful ones.

The readiness criteria for the adoption of the BT for the considered system are identified which are 10 ones and the structural relationship between them is uncovered through many interviews with experts. Hence, the found results define the most crucial criteria that should be valorized amongst the other criteria.

The originality of this study stems from its theoretical and practical relevance regarding the potential of the pharmaceutical system and the importance of the integration of new technologies as the BT. The ISM-MICMAC approach seems to be very performant for such preliminary study of the BT adoption in the Tunisian pharmaceutical system.

This study investigated leaders’ decision-making during crises. Using grounded theory research, we explored whether leaders’ use of either individualistic or collectivistic decision-making styles is based on the context of a crisis. In addition, the authors looked into the components of building leaders’ efficacy during a crisis event and gauged their attitudinal and behavioral reactions to the crisis.

The authors conducted interviews with 30 C-suite executives during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic to determine their responses to crises. The authors then used open, axial, and selective coding to examine their data, which was then extracted for representative themes and overarching dimensions. In total, The authors received 12 major themes largely summarizing into 6 overarching dimensions – context of decision-making, leaders’ efficacy, individualistic approach to decision-making, collectivistic approach to decision-making, process of decision-making, and outcomes.

The research presents a decision-making framework clearly bifurcating situations with the need for individualistic and collectivistic decision-making. While, a high level of urgency and scarce resources encouraged leaders to adopt an individualistic approach in which most of the decisions were intuition-based and only high-level stakeholders were involved, the less time urgent and uncertain situation allowed leaders to put significant effort into building their own knowledge systems and involving others. In addition, leaders’ efficacy is understood in terms of their attitudes, readiness and reactions, which further elaborated upon their knowledge systems to allow them to excel in decision-making irrespective of the approaches they chose.

The research has implications for leaders in the decision-making roles to be effective during both individualistic and collectivistic decision-making.