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This research work had been a double objective, to help the students achieve the learning outcomes, scientific skills and on the other hand, to develop specific scientific sub-competences, all of these related not only with the conceptual knowledge but also with the knowledge of procedurals and epistemology.

A didactic sequence has been designed and applied with students of the University Catholique of Louvain (Belgium) in collaboration with teachers from the University of Zaragoza (also researchers in the knowledge areas of Electronics, Applied Physics and the Didactics of Experimental Sciences). Several methodologies were applied thorough the teaching-learning sequence as the flipped classroom is. A varied sample of assessment instruments was used.

The results suggest this sequence produces a more significant learning than a more conventional teaching, however there is no increase in the number of students who passed. The students explaining phenomena scientifically, evaluating and designing experiments and making researchable questions and interpreting data and scientific evidence, which are a consequence of the development of scientific knowledge (content, procedural and epistemic). In addition, the students kept motivated by this methodological change and maintained the perception of having achieved the expected learning according to the objectives of the course.

Until a few years ago, research in the didactics of experimental sciences, and the application in the classroom of the results obtained, was limited to education in non-university stages. The opportunity of this work is to expand knowledge in relation to the application of didactic strategies in physics education at a higher level.

This chapter compares student and facilitator perceptions of what supports learning in teams in online environments. The authors (one Italian and one British) draw on their experiences facilitating modules in a UK-based online international professional doctorate of Higher Education with students from across the globe, as well as a two-year research project on developing best practice in supporting online international graduate students to engage in virtual learning teams. The theories underpinning the educational use of learning teams are those of constructivism and social learning, all of which suggest a facilitative role for the tutor. However, there is disagreement about what this looks like and what it means for student autonomy and facilitator presence. Many students expect greater tutor involvement, especially when teams are not functioning at an optimal level. The chapter offers both an in-depth discussion of the literature that looks at student and tutor perspectives on virtual team learning,and a summary of findings from a mixed methods research project on students’ needs and tutors’ practice while working in dispersed learning teams. Finally, the chapter draws out implications for the development of e-pedagogy to support learning and engage international learners in online contexts at the graduate level.

The purpose of this paper was to discover the best practices used by information technology (IT) project managers to determine what leadership skills, behaviors, communication tools and techniques are needed to lead and communicate effectively with virtual IT project teams.

In this qualitative case study, data was gathered by semistructured interviews from ten successful IT project managers from Northern California who had more than ten years of experience managing virtual teams (VTs) with growing and profitable IT companies in Silicon Valley, California.

IT project managers and leaders may consider building personal relationships with team members at the beginning of each project to foster a sense of camaraderie and common ground for the successful outcome and desired results. Maintaining cohesive team relationships to gain their trust and confidence may require additional coaching, mentoring, collaborating, recognizing their accomplishments, providing technical training, and understanding different cultures and local laws that relate to VTs to manage projects successfully to move projects forward in sustaining business, and assure customer satisfaction.

Findings from this study may assist IT project managers and leaders in building trust and rapport, increasing efficiency and developing effective lines of communication within their virtual IT teams.

In the postpandemic era, organizations have planned a combination of on-site and virtual work to portray the “New Normal”. The authors aim to analyze the effect of virtual team (VT)-building strategies on virtual team performance and HR performance in the “New Normal” context. This study aims to explore the drivers and barriers to VT performance and its contribution to HR performance.

The study utilized the grounded theory approach. Semistructured interviews with 114 VT leaders of national and multinational companies in India were conducted and NVivo 8.0 software was used to analyze data.

VT-building strategies contribute to VT collaboration and subsequently to VT performance. It was found that VT-building strategies catalyze VT collaboration which is impacted by the drivers and barriers of VTs, affecting VT performance and HR performance.

The primary contribution of this work is the development of a framework that delivers important insights to VT leaders, talent managers, HR professionals and academicians.

This study uniquely examines the VT-building strategies and VT performance through the “New Normal” paradigm lens. This study proposes a conceptual model for VT performance and HR performance. It also provides the team-building strategies, drivers and barriers for VT performance. This work offers the roadmap to achieve VT performance and HR performance. This research also contributes to the human resource management literature by discussing the VT performance and HR performance in the “New Normal” paradigm. It provides insights to VT leaders, talent managers, HR professionals and academicians.

This paper aims to examine how students can learn how to work in multi-cultural global virtual teams in a classroom-based setting using experiential learning. The students from two graduate programs in France and Japan were given relevant reading materials, individual and joint team assignments on virtual team work and were asked to evaluate their work using previously identified global virtual team key success factors.

Text-mining and co-word analyses of students’ assignments, and correlations of keyword frequencies with student culture scores provide insights on how students first experience this novel setting, raising their awareness and providing them skills for future application in an organizational setting.

The process experienced by virtual student teams has many similarities with the team formation stage in virtual teams in organizational settings. Such experiential learning is useful for global virtual team education, as students will have already experienced and solved typical challenges in a safer non-work-related setting.

This study is based on a small sample of respondents and therefore presents inherent limitations in terms of significance and generalizability.

The rise of information and communication technologies has facilitated the creation of new approaches for coordinating work and, subsequently, for new collaborative organizational forms. Little research has been conducted to address education or training for these new and essential forms of collaboration.

Recent advancements in the domain of smart communication systems and technologies have led to the augmented developments for very large scale integrated circuit designs in electro-magnetic applications. Increasing demands for low power, compact area and superior figure of merit–oriented circuit designs are the trends of the recent research studies. Hence, to accomplish such applications intended for optical communications, the transimpedance amplifier (TIA) was designed.

In this research work, the authors present a multi-layer active feedback structure which mainly composes a transimpedance stage and a gain stage followed by a low pass filter. This structure enables to achieve improved input impedance and superior gain. A simplified cascaded amplifier has also been designed in a hierarchical topology to improvise the noise effect further. The proposed TIA has been designed using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 45 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology. Moreover, the thermal noise has been analyzed at −3 dB bandwidth to prove the reduction in thermal noise with increase in frequency for most of the devices used in the designed circuit.

The proposed differential TIA circuit was found to obtain the transimpedance gain of 50.1 dBO without applying any external bias current which is almost 8% improvised as compared to the conventional circuit. In addition to this, bandwidth achieved was 2.15 GHz along with only 38 W of power consumption, which is reasonably 100 times improvised in comparison of conventional circuit. Hence, the proposed differential TIA is suitable for the low power optical communications applications intended to work on low supply voltage.

The designed work is done by authors in university lab premises and is not copied from anywhere. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is 100% original.

Reliable estimations of the extent of corrosion and time required to reach specific safety limits are crucial for assessing the reliability of aging reinforced concrete (RC) bridges. Engineers and decision-makers can use these figures to plan suitable inspection and maintenance operations.

Analytical, empirical and numerical approaches for estimating the service life of corroded RC structures were presented and compared. The concrete cover cracking times, which were predicted by the previously proposed analytical models, were compared with the experimentally obtained cracking times to identify the model/s for RC bridges. The shortcomings and limitations of the existing models are discussed.

The empirical models typically depend on the rate of corrosion, diameter of steel reinforcement and concrete cover depth and based on basic mathematical formula. In contrast, the analytical and numerical models contain the strength and stiffness properties of concrete as well as type of corrosion products and incorporate more complex mechanical factors. Four existing analytical models were analyzed and their performance was evaluated against existing experimental data in literature. All the considered analytical models were assumed thick-walled cylinder models. The maximum difference between observed cracking time from different test data and calculated cracking time using the developed models is 36.5%. The cracking times extend with increase in concrete cover and decrease with corrosion current density. The development of service life prediction models that considers factors such as heterogeneity of concrete, non-uniform corrosion along rebar, rust production rate and a more accurate representation of the corrosion accommodating region are some of the areas for further research.

Outcome of this paper partially bridge the gap between theory and practice, as it is the basis to estimate the serviceability of corrosion-affected RC structures and to propose maintenance and repair strategies for the structures. For structural design and evaluation, the crack-width criterion is the greatest practical importance, and structural engineers, operators and asset managers should pay close attention to it. Additionally, repair costs for corrosion-induced serviceability failures, particularly concrete cracking and spalling, are significantly higher than those for strength failures. Therefore, to optimize the maintenance cost of RC structures, it is essential to precisely forecast the serviceability of corrosion-affected concrete structures. The lifespan of RC structures may be extended by timely repairs. This helps stake holders to manage the resources.

In order to improve modeling of corrosion-induced cracking, important areas for future research were identified. Heterogeneity properties of concrete, concept of porous zone (accommodation effect of pores should be quantified), actual corrosion morphology (non-uniform corrosion along the length of rebar), interaction between sustain load and corrosions were not considered in existing models. Therefore, this work suggested for further researches should consider them as input and develop models which have best prediction capacity.

This work has positive impact on society and will not affect the quality of life. Predicting service life of structures is necessary for maintenance and repair strategy plans. Optimizing maintenance strategy is used to extend asset life, reduce asset failures, minimize repair cost, and improve health and safety for society.

The degree of accuracy and applicability of the existing service life prediction models used for RC were assessed by comparing the predicted cracking times with the experimentally obtained times reported in the literature. The shortcomings of the models were identified and areas where further research is required are recommended.

The paper aims to propose a rate‐dependent model of structural concrete in combination with the kinematics of condensed water.

First, the paper proposes the coupling model of water versus cracked concrete with a mathematical completeness of equilibrium and deformational compatibility. The proposed model deals with anisotropy of structural performance and of permeability, which is a particular issue of concrete caused by cracks. The governing equation for saturated concrete in this study is based on Biot's theory that deals with particle assembly as a two‐phase composite. Second, the paper shows the possible reduction of the fatigue life of real‐scale bridge RC decks owing to the water residing in structural cracks under moving wheel‐type loading.

The paper shows that the existence of water possibly has an influence on the rate‐dependency of structural performance. The comparison of transition of pore pressure and principal strain indicates that damage to the concrete skeleton is accelerated by internal stress caused by high pore pressure. It suggests that the existence of water can reduce the fatigue life of bridge decks, especially when the upper layer is saturated.

This paper clarifies the effect of pore water on structural concrete by using numerical model considering kinematics of water.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R&D and their impact on new product success.

A model was tested whereby trust and the integrated IT strategy account for a significant amount of the variance in a broad range of new product development (NPD) outcomes for a survey sample of 223 manufacturing firms. Respondents said design practices and quality methods like Six Sigma accounted for a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective NPD. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success.

Respondents reported that a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective included these quality methods. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. High-tech firms were less likely to report integrated IT strategies, but this tended to be counterbalanced by high levels of trust in the IT function and adoption of organizational innovations for execution of strategic intent. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Survey methods produce broad results with low response rates in most studies involving R&D and NPD, and this study is no exception.

With the challenge of strategy alignment reported by many of these firms, it seems clear that the top management team cannot afford to leave NPD challenges to engineering teams and NPD programs without guidance and general vision.

NPD has become the staple of most manufacturing firms as a way of meeting and beating the competition worldwide. However, trust between functional areas often starts before people are even employed and should begin in training and educational programs.

Designing NPD programs is at the heart of many firms’ competitive strategies and the fast learning companies are the winners. Very little is known about the trust relationship between IT and R&D and their combined effects on new product success which we have found to be significant and unexpected in their impacts.