Jun Xiao, Hong-Zheng Sun-Lin and Hsu-Chen Cheng
The purpose of this paper is to propose a design of online-merge-offline (OMO) classroom for open education with design principles related to practical issues of teachers’…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose a design of online-merge-offline (OMO) classroom for open education with design principles related to practical issues of teachers’ teaching, students’ learning and schools’ management.
Design/methodology/approach
Three stages were covered: drafted an OMO classroom framework, built a sample classroom and explored end-users’ experience. First, authors searched for and reviewed previous studies and related cases to draft an OMO framework. Second, a classroom, consisted of wireless devices, cloud-based services, Internet of Things terminals, ergonomics furniture, and comprehensive data management and analysis services, was built in Shanghai Open University. Third, invited 11 students’, 18 teachers’ and 9 school managers’ perspectives were collected and analysed by surveys and interviews.
Findings
All student participants responded positively in terms of learning experience in the classroom. They not only engaged in classroom activities such, but also accessed needed learning materials and interacted with teachers and peers anytime anywhere via mobile devices. Similarly, most teachers (90 per cent) made positive responses because of flexibility of teaching strategies and learning activities and expressed willingness to use the classroom in the future (94.4 per cent). In addition, more than 78 per cent of managers positively commented on the design of classroom, interaction effects and effective management. Visualised data allowed them to timely monitor status of facilities, comprehensively understand users’ behaviour and issues, make necessary decision with scientific evidence.
Research limitations/implications
The framework and classroom not only provide teachers, students, school managers and researcher with a better understanding of innovative open education, but also indicate the key role of objective-oriented and data-driven issues for further work.
Originality/value
To meet needs of teachers, students, managers and researchers in today’s open education, an OMO classroom was built in Shanghai Open University based on the proposed Objective-Oriented Pedagogy-Space-Technology (OPST) framework. The framework provides readers (especially teachers and administrators of open-education institutes, staff of information centres and ed-tech researchers) with a better understanding of innovative instruction and effective management, and the originally designed classroom can be a practical and illuminating example.
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Yancy Vaillant and Esteban Lafuente
The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether business owners that simultaneously demonstrate past entrepreneurial experience and process agility have greater export propensity…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether business owners that simultaneously demonstrate past entrepreneurial experience and process agility have greater export propensity levels.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed hypotheses are tested using binary choice models relating past entrepreneurial experience and reported process agility on a unique sample of 246 Catalan business owners for the year 2010.
Findings
Consistent with the theoretical arguments on the relevance of generative-based cognitive agility, the results of this paper reveal that serial entrepreneurs demonstrate a greater export propensity. Additionally, the authors found that serial entrepreneurs who also demonstrate process agility show superior export propensity levels, compared to the group of business owners outside this ambidextrous group (first-time business owners without process agility).
Research limitations/implications
The findings of this study indicate that traits characterizing international marketing agility, decisional speed and accuracy are also linked with greater export propensity levels. The added export market expansion resulting from the opportunity responsiveness of serial entrepreneurs is found to be amplified by the accuracy of internal adaptation capabilities of process agility.
Practical implications
Therefore, the promotion of ambidextrous strategic agility coming from the complementarities between the benefits of entrepreneurial experience and adaptive process abilities is essential for increasing businesses’ internationalization.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to the literature by further exploring the influence of different sources of agility on the internationalization of entrepreneurial ventures and opens a link between entrepreneurs prone toward export market expansion and international marketing agility.
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The purpose of this paper is to draw on the social cognitive theory to identify the determinants of online knowledge community user continuance, which reflects a user’s continued…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to draw on the social cognitive theory to identify the determinants of online knowledge community user continuance, which reflects a user’s continued use.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the 271 valid responses collected from a survey, structural equation modelling was employed to examine the research model.
Findings
The results indicated that the cognitive factors of outcome expectation and the environmental factors of system quality and knowledge quality significantly affect a user’s continuance intention, which, in turn, affects continuance usage.
Research limitations/implications
The results imply that service providers need to enhance community platforms and improve knowledge quality in order to retain users and facilitate their continuance.
Originality/value
Although previous research has examined online knowledge community user behaviour from multiple perspectives such as the social exchange theory and the motivational theory, it has seldom explored the relative effects of personal cognitions and environmental factors on user behaviour. This research fills the gap.
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This paper probes the factors which influence (i) the degree of internationalization and (ii) the subsequent economic performance, achieved by SMEs in India. These two objectives…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper probes the factors which influence (i) the degree of internationalization and (ii) the subsequent economic performance, achieved by SMEs in India. These two objectives have been examined in the context of firm level push/pull factors, barriers/challenges, firm resources, and strategy.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is based on empirical data gathered through a semi-structured questionnaire from 84 exporting SMEs in the (most internationalized) engineering industry of Bangalore in India during January 2012 to February 2013. The two key research questions have been analyzed using stepwise multiple regression models. The degree of internationalization is defined as the percentage of foreign sales in total sales turn over, as of 2010/2011, and economic performance is represented by (i) the value of sales turnover as of 2010/2011, and (ii) growth of sales turnover from inception till 2010/2011, alternatively. Firm level variables (age of firms, firm size, nature of firm organization), entrepreneurial characteristics (age of the founder and education), time taken to enter the export market for the first time, mode of entry, degree of initial internationalization, years of experience in the international market, whether operated in the international market continuously or not, number of markets currently exported, and number of learnings made are used as the possible explanatory factors for the first objective. In addition, current degree of internationalization is used as the possible explanatory factor for the current level of economic performance whereas initial degree of internationalization for the growth of sales turnover.
Findings
It is firm age, size and experience, and education of the CEO which influenced the degree of internationalization of SMEs. In addition, continuous operation in the international market after an early entry, leading to more learnings positively influenced the degree of internationalization. Further, those who adopted the MNC route as the mode of entry achieved a higher degree. However, what is more significant is the degree of initial internationalization achieved by the SMEs which had strongly influenced its current degree of internationalization. All these bring out that (i) firm level resources & competence and (ii) firm level strategy, together significantly contributed to the degree of internationalization achieved by the SMEs in an emerging economy like India. However, the degree of internationalization had a negative influence on the current sales turnover achieved. Whereas those SMEs, older in age, organized as private limited companies and led by more qualified CEOs, which catered to more number of countries could achieve a higher sales turnover. But degree of internationalization did not have any influence on firm growth. Only younger and smaller firms grew faster than older and larger firms, irrespective of the degree of internationalization.
Research implications
The above results bring out that to achieve a larger firm size, entering the international market need not be the only route, in the current era of globalization. It is possible to achieve a higher economic performance even with a domestic market focus, especially when the domestic market is registering a higher growth compared to the international market.
Originality
The degree of internationalization and its impact on the economic performance of SMEs have been hardly probed adequately based on empirical data in the context of emerging economies. This study fills this void. It reveals that in the era of globalization where domestic firms might have to face competition though not as much as those which operate in the international market, a larger firm size can be achieved with larger focus on the domestic market and with limited focus on the international market.
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Chen-Chien Hsu, Cheng-Kai Yang, Yi-Hsing Chien, Yin-Tien Wang, Wei-Yen Wang and Chiang-Heng Chien
FastSLAM is a popular method to solve the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, when the number of landmarks present in real environments increases…
Abstract
Purpose
FastSLAM is a popular method to solve the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, when the number of landmarks present in real environments increases, there are excessive comparisons of the measurement with all the existing landmarks in each particle. As a result, the execution speed will be too slow to achieve the objective of real-time navigation. Thus, this paper aims to improve the computational efficiency and estimation accuracy of conventional SLAM algorithms.
Design/methodology/approach
As an attempt to solve this problem, this paper presents a computationally efficient SLAM (CESLAM) algorithm, where odometer information is considered for updating the robot’s pose in particles. When a measurement has a maximum likelihood with the known landmark in the particle, the particle state is updated before updating the landmark estimates.
Findings
Simulation results show that the proposed CESLAM can overcome the problem of heavy computational burden while improving the accuracy of localization and mapping building. To practically evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a Pioneer 3-DX robot with a Kinect sensor is used to develop an RGB-D-based computationally efficient visual SLAM (CEVSLAM) based on Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). Experimental results confirm that the proposed CEVSLAM system is capable of successfully estimating the robot pose and building the map with satisfactory accuracy.
Originality/value
The proposed CESLAM algorithm overcomes the problem of the time-consuming process because of unnecessary comparisons in existing FastSLAM algorithms. Simulations show that accuracy of robot pose and landmark estimation is greatly improved by the CESLAM. Combining CESLAM and SURF, the authors establish a CEVSLAM to significantly improve the estimation accuracy and computational efficiency. Practical experiments by using a Kinect visual sensor show that the variance and average error by using the proposed CEVSLAM are smaller than those by using the other visual SLAM algorithms.
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This study uses the social identity theory and relationship marketing theory to investigate customer satisfaction, commitment, trust and loyalty towards hospitality brands…
Abstract
This study uses the social identity theory and relationship marketing theory to investigate customer satisfaction, commitment, trust and loyalty towards hospitality brands. Therefore, the author develops and empirically tests the relationships among these constructs. The methodology involved the use of structured equation models to investigate the hypothesised relationships. The results suggest that customer brand identification has a positive influence on loyalty, commitment, satisfaction and trust. The study also implies that commitment mediates the relationships between the three relational constructs (customer identification, trust and satisfaction) and brand loyalty.
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Steven J. Hyde, Eric Bachura and Joseph S. Harrison
Machine learning (ML) has recently gained momentum as a method for measurement in strategy research. Yet, little guidance exists regarding how to appropriately apply the method…
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) has recently gained momentum as a method for measurement in strategy research. Yet, little guidance exists regarding how to appropriately apply the method for this purpose in our discipline. We address this by offering a guide to the application of ML in strategy research, with a particular emphasis on data handling practices that should improve our ability to accurately measure our constructs of interest using ML techniques. We offer a brief overview of ML methodologies that can be used for measurement before describing key challenges that exist when applying those methods for this purpose in strategy research (i.e., sample sizes, data noise, and construct complexity). We then outline a theory-driven approach to help scholars overcome these challenges and improve data handling and the subsequent application of ML techniques in strategy research. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by applying it to create a linguistic measure of CEOs' motivational needs in a sample of S&P 500 firms. We conclude by describing steps scholars can take after creating ML-based measures to continue to improve the application of ML in strategy research.
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The purpose of this paper is to draw on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework to examine users’ knowledge sharing in online health communities (OHC).
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to draw on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework to examine users’ knowledge sharing in online health communities (OHC).
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the 326 valid responses collected from a survey, structural equation modelling was employed to examine the research model.
Findings
The results indicated that both information quality and service quality affect trust in community, whereas both informational support and emotional support affect trust in other members. Both types of trust and privacy risk determine users’ sharing intention, which in turn affects sharing behaviour.
Research limitations/implications
The results imply that service providers need to improve their community platforms and create a supportive climate in order to facilitate users’ trust and their knowledge sharing behaviour.
Originality/value
Previous studies have examined a few determinants of OHC user behaviour such as privacy concern, trust and motivations. However, they have seldom disclosed the internal decision process underlying users’ knowledge sharing. This research tries to fill the gap.