Sandrotua Bali, Tsai-Ching Chen, Ming-Chou Liu, Suriya Klangrit and Cheng-Yi Lin
With the increasing number of institutions offering online degree programs, there is a growing need to understand the requirements for interactions and the challenges present in…
Abstract
Purpose
With the increasing number of institutions offering online degree programs, there is a growing need to understand the requirements for interactions and the challenges present in online learning environments. Consequently, this qualitative study aims to explore aspects of nontraditional students, typically defined as older than traditional college age, employed full-time or with family responsibilities.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employs a qualitative approach, conducting in-depth interviews with nine nontraditional students. Grounded in social presence theory, this study analyzed the experiences and viewpoints of nontraditional students in the online learning environment, utilizing thematic analysis.
Findings
Thematic analysis unveiled two major themes: interactions in online learning and challenges in online learning. Four sub-themes emerged from interactions in online learning (interaction with instructors, interaction with peers, content interaction and interface interaction). In addition, three sub-themes emerged from challenges in online learning (timing inflexibility, tools and technological barriers and diverse learning modes). The findings of this suggest that nontraditional students derived benefits from online learning, yet they faced limitations in peer interaction and experienced technological barriers.
Originality/value
This study is based on primary data collected from nontraditional students, offering valuable insights into the needs and challenges they face in higher education while engaged in online learning.
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Ting‐Peng Liang, Cheng‐Yi Lin and Deng‐Neng Chen
The rapid proliferation of the Internet has allowed many firms to use this new technology to run Web‐based electronic stores to expand their markets and to enhance the operational…
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of the Internet has allowed many firms to use this new technology to run Web‐based electronic stores to expand their markets and to enhance the operational performance. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate why electronic commerce benefits some industries more than others, and what factors affect the impact of using e‐Stores on performance in different industries. This paper reports findings on the effect of industrial characteristics, as portrayed by product information content and information intensity of the value chain, and e‐commerce models on firm performance. The results indicate that both industrial characteristics and e‐commerce models have significant effects on firm performance. Among the industrial characteristics, information content of the product and information intensity of the value chain have been found to have a significant impact on firm performances.
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Che-Chih Tsao, Ho-Hsin Chang, Meng-Hao Liu, Ho-Chia Chen, Yun-Tang Hsu, Pei-Ying Lin, Yih-Lin Chou, Ying-Chieh Chao, Yun-Hui Shen, Cheng-Yi Huang, Kai-Chiang Chan and Yi-Hung Chen
The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate a new additive manufacturing approach that breaks the layer-based point scanning limitations to increase fabrication speed…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate a new additive manufacturing approach that breaks the layer-based point scanning limitations to increase fabrication speed, obtain better surface finish, achieve material flexibility and reduce equipment costs.
Design/methodology/approach
The freeform additive manufacturing approach conceptually views a 3D article as an assembly of freeform elements distributed spatially following a flexible 3D assembly structure, which conforms to the surface of the article and physically builds the article by sequentially forming the freeform elements by a vari-directional vari-dimensional capable material deposition mechanism. Vari-directional building along tangential directions of part surface gives surface smoothness. Vari-dimensional deposition maximizes material output to increase build rate wherever allowed and minimizes deposition sizes for resolution whenever needed.
Findings
Process steps based on geometric and data processing considerations were described. Dispensing and forming of basic vari-directional and vari-dimensional freeform elements and basic operations of joining them were developed using thermoplastics. Forming of 3D articles at build rates of 2-5 times the fused deposition modeling (FDM) rate was demonstrated and improvement over ten times was shown to be feasible. FDM compatible operations using 0.7 mm wire depositions from a variable exit-dispensing unit were demonstrated. Preliminary tests of a surface finishing process showed a result of 0.8-1.9 um Ra. Initial results of dispensing wax, tin alloy and steel were also shown.
Originality/value
This is the first time that both vari-directional and vari-dimensional material depositions are combined in a new freeform building method, which has potential impact on the FDM and other additive manufacturing methods.
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Hsiu-Chuan Lee, Chih-Hsiang Hsu and Cheng-Yi Chien
The purpose of this paper is to investigate volatility spillovers across the interest rate swap markets of the G7 economies, and then the authors investigate whether spillovers of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate volatility spillovers across the interest rate swap markets of the G7 economies, and then the authors investigate whether spillovers of swap markets contain useful information to explain subsequent stock price movements.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses the short- and long-term swap spread volatility of the G7 countries to explore the spillover effects of international swap markets, and then investigates the relationship between swap and stock markets. The authors use the generalized VAR approach suggested by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) to study spillovers of international swap markets. The Granger-causality tests are employed to examine the linkage of interest rate swap and stock markets.
Findings
This paper shows that a moderate spillover effect exists for the short- and long-term swap markets. Moreover, the results show that the short- and long-term swap markets of France and Germany have a larger impact on other countries’ swap markets than that of other countries’ swap markets on the French and German swap markets. Finally, the results indicate that the total volatility spillovers for the long-term swap markets have a larger influence on the total volatility spillover index of stock markets and the global stock market volatility than that of the short-term swap markets.
Originality/value
Prior literature has used impulse response and variance decomposition analyses to investigate international swap markets linkages. However, the results depend on the ordering of variables. This study uses the framework of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) to overcome the ordering issue, and thus the authors can compute directional spillovers. This paper is the first study to explore the linkage of the total volatility spillover of swap markets and the stock markets.
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Aqsa Jaleel and Muhammad Sarmad
How leaders’ empowerment impacts followers' job performance in learning organizations seeks much attention. Under the lens of self-determination theory, this research examines the…
Abstract
Purpose
How leaders’ empowerment impacts followers' job performance in learning organizations seeks much attention. Under the lens of self-determination theory, this research examines the mediating role of work-related curiosity between empowering leadership and job-crafting behaviors. Furthermore, by applying trait activation theory, this study aims to examine the moderating role of gender egalitarianism in the relationship between empowering leadership and work-related curiosity among teachers.
Design/methodology/approach
A time-lagged data from 310 teachers was collected. The quantitative research method under the deductive approach and positivism research philosophy was applied. The data was analyzed through the SPSS and structured equation modeling technique under SMART-PLS.
Findings
The results show that empowering leadership is positively related to job crafting dimensions. Simultaneously, work-related curiosity mediates these predictive relations. Moreover, low gender egalitarianism moderates empowering leadership and work-related curiosity.
Originality/value
Investigating the direct and indirect effects of empowering leadership on the dimensions of job crafting is scarce, especially in learning organizations with a low gender egalitarian culture. By using the self-determination theory, this study analyzed work-related curiosity as a mediating path between empowering leadership and job crafting. The cultural circumstances under empowering leadership are important for work-related curiosity. Finally, the moderating role of gender egalitarianism is established between empowering leadership and work-related curiosity in the unique context of an underdeveloped country, Pakistan. In addition, this study provides important theoretical and managerial implications for learning organizations for needful job crafting behaviors.
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The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic literature review on taxonomy alignment methods in information science to explore the common research pipeline and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic literature review on taxonomy alignment methods in information science to explore the common research pipeline and characteristics.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors implement a five-step systematic literature review process relating to taxonomy alignment. They take on a knowledge organization system (KOS) perspective, and specifically examining the level of KOS on “taxonomies.”
Findings
They synthesize the matching dimensions of 28 taxonomy alignment studies in terms of the taxonomy input, approach and output. In the input dimension, they develop three characteristics: tree shapes, variable names and symmetry; for approach: methodology, unit of matching, comparison type and relation type; for output: the number of merged solutions and whether original taxonomies are preserved in the solutions.
Research limitations/implications
The main research implications of this study are threefold: (1) to enhance the understanding of the characteristics of a taxonomy alignment work; (2) to provide a novel categorization of taxonomy alignment approaches into natural language processing approach, logic-based approach and heuristic-based approach; (3) to provide a methodological guideline on the must-include characteristics for future taxonomy alignment research.
Originality/value
There is no existing comprehensive review on the alignment of “taxonomies”. Further, no other mapping survey research has discussed the comparison from a KOS perspective. Using a KOS lens is critical in understanding the broader picture of what other similar systems of organizations are, and enables us to define taxonomies more precisely.
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Yensen Ni, Yi-Rung Cheng and Paoyu Huang
The purpose of this study is to find evidence of the impact of intellectual capital on firm value, and, in turn, enhance the existing literature which lacks consensus on it. By…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to find evidence of the impact of intellectual capital on firm value, and, in turn, enhance the existing literature which lacks consensus on it. By employing some distinctive proxies for human capital, innovation capital, customer capital and process capital, this study might provide valuable information for firms to make strategic decisions.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses Tobin's Q to represent firm value and various variables to be the proxies for intellectual capitals. By utilizing firm-year observations, this study applies panel data models first, and then Petersen regression models for further investigation to enhance the robustness of the empirical results.
Findings
Firm value is affected positively by the average net profit per employee as well as goodwill and intangible assets. This is because firms having employees with abundant knowledge will possess advantage for innovation, and the excellent reputation, a part of goodwill for oriental firms, would encourage people to consume and invest more.
Research limitations/implications
The constraint of data resource is the main limitation. With the limited scales and as an emerging market of Taiwan Stock Exchange, it is not confirmed whether the results are appropriate for the developed markets. Nevertheless, firms should make efforts on developing intellectual capital and corporate governance for operating businesses with competitiveness and safety.
Originality/value
Since capable employees enhance the innovation, innovation improves customer's satisfaction and good customer relationship increases the sales; this study illustrates that for expanding businesses, firms should make more efforts on developing intellectual capital.
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In his autobiography, Chen Shui-bian (1999, p. 40) condemned the Koumintang's (KMT's) corruption and praised the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for being free from money…
Abstract
In his autobiography, Chen Shui-bian (1999, p. 40) condemned the Koumintang's (KMT's) corruption and praised the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for being free from money politics and corruption. The DPP fought the 1992 Legislative Yuan election campaign effectively on an anticorruption platform and used the same strategy in subsequent elections. If Chen Shui-bian had criticized the KMT for its involvement with “black gold” politics and had won the 2000 presidential election on his anticorruption platform, why was he and his family found guilty of corruption after his second term of office? The short answer is that even though he had promised to curb corruption, President Chen himself had succumbed to corruption after assuming office. In June 2002, Keesing's Contemporary Archives cited a poll in Taiwan that indicated that more respondents had perceived the DPP to be more corrupt than the KMT (Copper, 2006, p. 14).
Yi-Cheng Chen and Yen-Liang Chen
In this “Info-plosion” era, recommendation systems (or recommenders) play a significant role in finding interesting items in the surge of online digital activity and e-commerce…
Abstract
Purpose
In this “Info-plosion” era, recommendation systems (or recommenders) play a significant role in finding interesting items in the surge of online digital activity and e-commerce. The purpose of this paper is to model users' preference evolution to recommend potential items which users may be interested in.
Design/methodology/approach
A novel recommendation system, namely evolution-learning recommendation (ELR), is developed to precisely predict user interest for making recommendations. Differing from prior related methods, the authors integrate the matrix factorization (MF) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to effectively describe the variation of user preferences over time.
Findings
A novel cumulative factorization technique is proposed to efficiently decompose a rating matrix for discovering latent user preferences. Compared to traditional MF-based methods, the cumulative MF could reduce the utilization of computation resources. Furthermore, the authors depict the significance of long- and short-term effects in the memory cell of RNN for evolution patterns. With the context awareness, a learning model, V-LSTM, is developed to dynamically capture the evolution pattern of user interests. By using a well-trained learning model, the authors predict future user preferences and recommend related items.
Originality/value
Based on the relations among users and items for recommendation, the authors introduce a novel concept, virtual communication, to effectively learn and estimate the correlation among users and items. By incorporating the discovered latent features of users and items in an evolved manner, the proposed ELR model could promote “right” things to “right” users at the “right” time. In addition, several extensive experiments are performed on real datasets and are discussed. Empirical results show that ELR significantly outperforms the prior recommendation models. The proposed ELR exhibits great generalization and robustness in real datasets, including e-commerce, industrial retail and streaming service, with all discussed metrics.
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Yi-Cheng Chen, Yun-Hao Cheng, Jui-Tang Tseng and Kun-Ju Hsieh
This paper aims to present simulation results of a harmonic drive (HD) with involute flexspline (FS) profiles based on two-dimensional (2-D) finite element analysis (FEA).
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to present simulation results of a harmonic drive (HD) with involute flexspline (FS) profiles based on two-dimensional (2-D) finite element analysis (FEA).
Design/methodology/approach
First, the mathematical model of the FS with involute tooth profile was developed using a straight-edge rack cutter based on the theory of gearing. Then the engaging circular spline (CS) with conjugate tooth profile of FS was derived based on the enveloping theory and theory of gearing. Additionally, a mesh generation program was developed to discretize the FS based on the mathematical model. An elliptical wave generator (WG) was inserted into the FS, and a torque was applied to drive the FS meshing with the CS. The WG and the CS were both assumed to be rigid in the finite element model.
Findings
Finally, a 2-D FEA was conducted to explore the stress distribution on the FS, the engagement movement of the FS, the torsional stiffness and the engaged area of teeth of the HD under various conditions. Moreover, this research also studied the effect of changing pressure angle of the involute FS on the performance of the HD.
Research limitations/implications
The simulation model and methodology presented in this paper paved the way for further investigation and optimization of the HD with involute tooth profile FS and conjugate CS.
Originality/value
The simulation model of HD is established on conjugate shape based on the theory of gearing and an automatic mesh generation program is developed to generate the finite element model. The characteristics of the HD can thus be simulated according to the developed model.