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Considerable research has shown the value of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) regarding student engagement and motivation, depth of learning, and cognitive flexibility. Student collaboration is one component of this approach, since students must communicate and work together inside and outside of class time when engaging with an IBL project. Choosing a mobile learning tool can benefit student collaboration in so far as the tool enables anytime/anywhere collaborative learning. This study looked at how 118 Emirati undergraduate students in a government-sponsored university in the United Arab Emirates chose to collaborate in an IBL semester-long assignment. Unlike some approaches that dictate the technology selection to students (Barczyk & Duncan, 2013; Prescott, Wilson & Becket, 2013), in this project course instructors gave the students autonomy to choose the best mobile learning tools for their group. The study used a mixed-methods approach to collect data on which tools students perceived as best for IBL. Participants were surveyed three times about which tool they preferred for university work: a pre-project survey, a mid-project survey, and post-project survey. Results show that students changed their preferred tool to WhatsApp over the course of the semester. A focus group with each course section provided qualitative data as to why students preferred WhatsApp. The students also delivered poster presentations as to how WhatsApp helped them complete their community-based IBL projects. This study will show how WhatsApp can be a successful mobile learning tool for student collaboration in IBL.

This study aims to explore the consequences of inconsistent diversity-related signals for job seekers. Information sources include strategically crafted corporate signals and independent sources. The authors seek to understand the effect of inconsistent diversity signals on job seekers attitudes and behavior during recruitment.

An experiment was conducted wherein two samples from job-seeking populations were first exposed to a fictitious corporate website and then to LinkedIn profiles of that organization’s employees, with systematically varied diversity signals.

Results demonstrated that conflicting diversity signals had negative effects on perceived organizational attractiveness in the student sample (N = 427) and on organizational agreeableness in the working sample (N = 243). Negative organizational attraction was related to a lower likelihood of participants applying.

This work provides a stark but an important message to practitioners: signaling diversity-related values on corporate websites may backfire for organizations that actually lack diversity.

Few studies have combined communication theories with recruitment to examine the link between diversity signals and inconsistent information gathered via social media.