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This study aims to examine how lecturers at a South African university navigated teaching and learning in the current educational landscape obscured by the global pandemic. The authors examine how lecturers employed a community of inquiry (CoI) in their online classrooms within the context of emergency remote teaching (ERT). The study further aims to ascertain students’ feedback concerning current ERT practices at the university toward cultivating a CoI. Doing this would offer more appropriate interventions and support for lecturers and students from, within and for an African context. If not, instructors might risk reproducing and perpetuating the same outdated pedagogies before the pandemic.

A mixed-method research design informed by a pragmatist paradigm was used. Primary data were collected from 40 lecturers at the university through online questionnaires of which 10 lecturers responded to e-mail interviews. The original CoI survey was distributed among 150 students in the Faculty of Education at the university.

The findings revealed that, despite the rushed and trial nature of the use of ERT, there were instances of a CoI among students. The findings further revealed that the majority of the lecturers were not adequately prepared for ERT as a result of limited experience with asynchronous and synchronous online teaching. There was evidence of an absence of a strong active teaching presence that was found to have negatively influenced the development of social and cognitive presences during ERT.

Only a single faculty at one university was selected in this single case.

The results of the study have significant implications for faculties and academic staff who are currently teaching online in response to the teaching challenges paused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings will assist lecturers in developing appropriate pedagogical intervention strategies to enhance strong and active teaching and social presences necessary for cultivating the cognitive presences among students during ERT.

This is one of the first empirical studies to explore the influence of ERT on the cognitive, social and teaching presences at a university in an African context. The findings and conclusion of the study are novel as they relate to the development of appropriate pedagogical practices and intervention strategies suitable for ERT in response to the current education crisis.

This chapter develops a model and provides an exemplary case study of social intrapreneurship within a for-profit organization. The model has two components. The first looks at the antecedent conditions enabling social intrapreneurship, identifying three deinstitutionalizing mechanisms that ready a traditional for-profit organization to embrace a social enterprise: (1) changes in extra-organizational environment that disconnect sanctions and rewards; (2) disassociating existing institutional norms and practices from their mooring in a moral foundation; and (3) undermining core assumptions and beliefs. The second component of the model suggests that the social intrapreneurship process unfolds in four phases associated: (1) socialization (conception of social enterprise idea), (2) externalization (development), (3) integration (implementation), and (4) the internalization (institutionalization). We use the model as a lens to examine the history and development of the First Community Bank in Boston and end with a discussion of the implications of our research for theory and practice.

During the past decade, fast-paced changes created a new environment organisations need to adapt to in an agile way. To support their transformation, organisations are rethinking their approach to learning. They are moving away from traditional instructor-centred, standardised classroom-based learning settings. Instead, learning needs to be tailored to the individuals’ needs, available anywhere at any time and needs to enable learners to build their network. The development of digital tools, specifically network technology and social collaboration platforms, has enabled these new learning concepts.

The use of these new learning concepts in organisations also has implications for higher education. The present case study, therefore, investigates how universities can best prepare future employees and leaders for these new working environments, both on a content level and a methodological level. It also investigates if these new learning concepts can support universities in dealing with a changing environment.

The investigated case is a traditional face-to-face leadership lecture for a heterogeneous group of students. It was reconceptualised as a personalised and social collaborative learning setting, delivered through a social collaboration platform as the primary learning environment. Initial evaluation results indicate positive motivational effects, experience sharing and changes in perception of the student − lecturer relationship. The findings also supported previous challenges of computer-supported collaborative learning settings, such as the perception of a higher cognitive load. The implications of these results for the future teaching and business models of higher education are discussed. In addition, the potential of these computer-supported social collaborative learning settings is outlined.

This chapter focuses on diversity issues in France. It shows how these issues came historically in the French context and how the main tensions generated, notably the equality-diversity and universality-diversity tensions, are not understandable without a knowledge of the French Republicanism which gives to the foundations of the French social fabric its peculiarities.

Browsing a database of article abstracts is one way to select and buy relevant magazine articles online. Our research contributes to the design and development of text grammars for abstracting texts in unlimited subject domains. We developed a system that parses texts based on the text grammar of a specific text type and that extracts sentences and statements which are relevant for inclusion in the abstracts. The system employs knowledge of the discourse patterns that are typical of news stories. The results are encouraging and demonstrate the importance of discourse structures in text summarisation.

The chapter Technological Advances in Special Education provides information on advances of technology and how such technological advances have influenced students with disabilities and special education across the globe. The chapter presents technological advances that benefited students with disabilities in developed countries as well as potential technologies to support students with disabilities in developing countries. The scant exiting literature on developing countries suggests some universal themes regarding technology for students with disabilities including access and training. Additional attention and research is needed on assistive technology to support students with disabilities in both developed and developing countries, with recognition that what works is developed counties may not work in developing.

Human life course is shaped by a set of consecutive roles, such as being a worker, a spouse and a parent in a standard biography. However, being instantly disengaged from any of these roles may cause devastating effects on people’s lives. This discontinuity not only influences the very dynamics of the meaning of working, but also causes aging labor force to be excluded from the market economy. Experienced workers are drained from the pool of labor force just because they are old. This study aims at focusing on the effects of compulsory retirement both upon individual and upon structure, through the lenses of Political Economy of Aging (PEA) and Human Resources Management (HRM). The PEA perspective proposes a tripartite relationship among state (politics), market (economy) and individual (society), while HRM perspective provides an insight of an effective use of workforce from different generations, including older generation.

The authors have developed a robot called “Robovie” that has unique mechanisms designed for communication with humans. Robovie can generate human‐like behaviors by using human‐like actuators and vision and audio sensors. Software is a key element in the systems development. Two important ideas in human‐robot communication through research from the viewpoint of cognitive science have been obtained – one is importance of physical expressions using the body and the other is the effectiveness of the robot’s autonomy in the robot’s utterance recognition by humans. Based on these psychological experiments, a new architecture that generates episode chains in interactions with humans is developed. The basic structure of the architecture is a network of situated modules. Each module consists of elemental behaviors to entrain humans and a behavior for communicating with humans.