The e-revolution and post-compulsory education: using e-business models to deliver quality education

The best practices of e-business are revolutionising not just technology itself but the whole process through which services are provided; and from which important lessons can be learnt by post-compulsory educational institutions. This book aims to move debates about ICT and higher education beyond a simple focus on e-learning by considering the provision of post-compulsory education as a whole. It considers what we mean by e-business, why e-business approaches are relevant to universities and colleges and the key issues this raises for post-secondary education

Into the Black Box: Designing for Transparency in Artificial Intelligence

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The rapid infusion of artificial intelligence into everyday technologies means that consumers are likely to interact with intelligent systems that provide suggestions and recommendations on a daily basis in the very near future. While these technologies promise much, current issues in low transparency create high potential to confuse end-users, limiting the market viability of these technologies. While efforts are underway to make machine learning models more transparent, HCI currently lacks an understanding of how these model-generated explanations should best translate into the practicalities of system design. To address this gap, my research took a pragmatic approach to improving system transparency for end-users. Through a series of three studies, I investigated the need and value of transparency to end-users, and explored methods to improve system designs to accomplish greater transparency in intelligent systems offering recommendations. My research resulted in a summarized taxonomy that outlines a variety of motivations for why users ask questions of intelligent systems; useful for considering the type and category of information users might appreciate when interacting with AI-based recommendations. I also developed a categorization of explanation types, known as explanation vectors, that is organized into groups that correspond to user knowledge goals. Explanation vectors provide system designers options for delivering explanations of system processes beyond those of basic explainability. I developed a detailed user typology, which is a four-factor categorization of the predominant attitudes and opinion schemes of everyday users interacting with AI-based recommendations; useful to understand the range of user sentiment towards AI-based recommender features, and possibly useful for tailoring interface design by user type. Lastly, I developed and tested an evaluation method known as the System Transparency Evaluation Method (STEv), which allows for real-world systems and prototypes to be evaluated and improved through a low-cost query method. Results from this dissertation offer concrete direction to interaction designers as to how these results might manifest in the design of interfaces that are more transparent to end users. These studies provide a framework and methodology that is complementary to existing HCI evaluation methods, and lay the groundwork upon which other research into improving system transparency might build

Changing communication on researchgate through interface updates

Informal scholarly communication across the Web is a growing component of the scholarly communication infrastructure. This study describes the effects of three different interfaces on these informal channels. Interface design has a widely studied effect on user behavior, and new users often encounter barriers during accessing social media tools. Using a mixed methods approach, we collected and grouped 413 posts across three distinct interfaces of ResearchGate's communication platform. Our results show that scholars were more polite in the initial group discussion interface but that user interface design did not change the core communication patterns of sharing information and opinions among scholars. The site also transitioned from one-to-many discussions to one-to-one posts, but new users were generally welcomed to the scholarly communications

Information exchange on an academic social networking site: A multidiscipline comparison on researchgate Q&A

The increasing popularity of academic social networking sites (ASNSs) requires studies on the usage of ASNSs among scholars and evaluations of the effectiveness of these ASNSs. However, it is unclear whether current ASNSs have fulfilled their design goal, as scholars' actual online interactions on these platforms remain unexplored. To fill the gap, this article presents a study based on data collected from ResearchGate. Adopting a mixed-method design by conducting qualitative content analysis and statistical analysis on 1,128 posts collected from ResearchGate Q&A, we examine how scholars exchange information and resources, and how their practices vary across three distinct disciplines: library and information services, history of art, and astrophysics. Our results show that the effect of a questioner's intention (i.e., seeking information or discussion) is greater than disciplinary factors in some circumstances. Across the three disciplines, responses to questions provide various resources, including experts' contact details, citations, links to Wikipedia, images, and so on. We further discuss several implications of the understanding of scholarly information exchange and the design of better academic social networking interfaces, which should stimulate scholarly interactions by minimizing confusion, improving the clarity of questions, and promoting scholarly content management

The relation between content typology and consumer engagement in Instagram

The use of social media channels has been growing significantly, bringing a third of the worldwide population online. Thus, brands’ presence in online channels has become critical to communicate and engage with consumers through brand pages such as Instagram accounts. For brands to stand out in Instagram, their content marketing strategies must be consistent with the brand’s mission and relevant to attract their target audience. Therefore, to grasp consumers’ attention, content needs to be original, unique and appealing. This dissertation aims to study the relation between content delivered by brands and consumer engagement in Instagram. Three hypotheses were proposed regarding whether consumer engagement was impacted by different content types, human presence and reposting on Instagram. Content typology was based on a theoretical framework, which subdivided content into different categories (Brand Awareness, Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Service, Engagement, Product Awareness, Promotion and Seasonal). Consumer engagement was measured by users’ reactions (number of likes and comments) on posts of two fashion accessories brands. Results showed that content typology has a significant impact on consumer engagement, and that there was a linear trend between all types of content, being Brand Awareness the content which raised higher engagement. Additionally, consumer engagement was higher when posts showed only the product itself and were original content from the brands rather than reposts.O uso de plataformas de redes sociais tem aumentado significativamente nos últimos anos e já reúne um terço da população mundial online. Desta forma, a presença das marcas nas redes sociais é fundamental para comunicar e interagir com os consumidores através de aplicações como o Instagram. Para as marcas se destacarem no Instagram, as estratégias de marketing de conteúdo devem ser consistentes com a missão da marca e relevantes para atrair o público-alvo. Para tal, o conteúdo publicado deve ser original, único e atrativo. Esta dissertação visa estudar a relação entre o conteúdo das marcas e o envolvimento do consumidor no Instagram. Foram propostas três hipóteses relacionadas com o impacto de tipos de conteúdo, a presença humana e o reposting no envolvimento do consumidor no Instagram. A tipologia de conteúdo utilizada foi baseada num quadro teórico que dividia o conteúdo em sete categorias diferentes: consciência da marca, envolvimento, responsabilidade social corporativa, consciência de produto, serviço ao cliente, promoção e sazonalidade. O envolvimento do consumidor foi medido através de interações nas redes sociais (número de gostos e comentários) de publicações de duas marcas na indústria de acessórios de moda. Resultados mostram que a tipologia de conteúdo tem um impacto significativo no envolvimento do consumidor e que existe uma tendência linear entre todos os tipos de conteúdo apresentados, sendo que conteúdos de consciência da marca despoletaram maior envolvimento. Adicionalmente, o envolvimento do consumidor foi maior quando o conteúdo mostrou apenas os produtos (sem presença humana) e quando era original das marcas (ao invés de ser repost)

Religious Prosocial Crowdlending - Dual-market Success Mechanisms

Paper I is excluded from the dissertation due to copyright. Paper II and III are excluded from the dissertation until it is publishedCrowdfunding is a relatively new and rapidly growing global phenomenon that has appealed to academic curiosity. At its crux, it is rooted in the communal philosophy of greater good. The online technological intervention can be traced back to 2006, while the phenomenon took center-stage in the midst of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Over a decade and a half, the crowdfunding industry has grown into several distinct forms and business models. This dissertation started with a systematic literature review that broadly considered four mainstream business models of crowdfunding, and how it is possible to bridge the knowledge gaps left behind. This led to two empirical papers, motivated by the World Bank’s recommendation of a hybrid type of crowdfunding called prosocial crowdlending, to alleviate poverty from the developing economies, where poverty alleviation is the first of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. While considering the developing economies that are innately non-secular, Islam was one of the religions that did not contribute to economic success as per the extant literature. On the contrary, such Islamic developing economies have thriving religious markets. This presented a dichotomy between theory and practice and a research gap that needed to be addressed. Insights from Max Weber that religions such as Christianity have clearly contributed to economic development of the West were recalled. These insights were applied in the empirical papers focusing on Islam, extending Weber’s seminal work from west to east. The findings of the empirical papers suggest that Islam does contribute to economic growth, albeit in a welfarist sense rather than in a capitalist sense. The overall contribution that this dissertation makes to the religious prosocial crowdlending is in identifying its dual-market success mechanisms through the developed theories and integrated typologies. These explain how religious capital is being converted to economic capital facilitated by trust in otherwise low-trust developing economies, on the supply side, and religious rationality that encourages sustainable micro-entrepreneurship despite the longstanding duality between religion and reason, on the demand side. In doing so, this dissertation also explains how Islam contributes to the economic welfare of such economies, and how to channelize religious capital towards economic development by utilizing technologically enabled religious prosocial crowdlending as a strategic philanthropic tool, to successfully impact poverty by enabling micro-entrepreneurship.publishedVersio

The Role of Deliberative Collaborative Governance in Achieving Sustainable Cities

Sustainability issues involve complex interactions between social, economic, and environmental factors that are often viewed quite differently by disparate stakeholder groups. Issues of non-sustainability are wicked problems that have many, often obscure causes, and for which there is no single, straightforward solution. Furthermore, the concept of sustainability is itself contested. For example there are disputes over whether a strong or weak interpretation of sustainability should be adopted. In cities, as elsewhere, sustainability therefore requires discursive plurality and multiple sites of action. It is the thesis of this paper that effective problem solving, decision-making and enacting of a sustainability agenda require deliberative collaborative governance (DCG), a logical hybrid of the closely related fields of deliberative democracy and collaborative governance. We provide a provisional typology of different modes of deliberative collaborative governance, explaining each with a sustainability example, with a particular focus on DCG initiatives for planning in Western Australia. It is argued that the lens provided by such a typology can help us to understand the factors likely to promote better resolution of wicked problems and increased sustainability

A machine learning-based approach to predicting success of questions on social question-answering

While social question-answering (SQA) services are becoming increasingly popular, there is often an issue of unsatisfactory or missing information for a question posed by an information seeker. This study creates a model to predict question failure, or a question that does not receive an answer, within the social Q&A site Yahoo! Answers. To do so, observed shared characteristics of failed questions were translated into empirical features, both textual and non-textual in nature, and measured using machine extraction methods. A classifier was then trained using these features and tested on a data set of 400 questions – half of them successful, half not – to determine the accuracy of the classifier in identifying failed questions. The results show the substantial ability of the approach to correctly identify the likelihood of success or failure of a question, resulting in a promising tool to automatically identify ill-formed questions and/or questions that are likely to fail and make suggestions on how to revise them.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Accountability as a Debiasing Strategy: Testing the Effect of Racial Diversity in Employment Committees

Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the primary goal of integrating the workforce and eliminating arbitrary bias against minorities and other groups who had been historically excluded. Yet substantial research reveals that racial bias persists and continues to limit opportunities and outcomes for racial minorities in the workplace. Because these denials of opportunity result from myriad individual hiring and promotion decisions made by vast numbers of managers, finding effective strategies to reduce the impact of bias has proven challenging. Some have proposed that a sense of accountability, or “the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, and actions to others,” can decrease bias. This Article examines the conditions under which accountability to a committee of peers reduces racial bias and discrimination. More specifically, this Article provides the first empirical test of whether an employment committee’s racial composition influences the decision-making process. My experimental results reveal that race does in fact matter. Accountability to a racially diverse committee leads to more hiring and promotion of underrepresented minorities than does accountability to a homogeneous committee. Members of diverse committees were more likely to value diversity, acknowledge structural discrimination, and favor inclusive promotion decisions. This suggests that accountability as a debiasing strategy is more nuanced than previously theorized. If simply changing the racial composition of a committee can indeed nudge less discriminatory behavior, we can encourage these changes through voluntary organizational policies like having an NFL “Rooney Rule” for hiring committees. In addition, Title VII can be interpreted to hold employers liable under a negligence theory to encourage the types of changes that yield inclusive hires and promotions

Liability for Mobile Health and Wearable Technologies

Most of the legal commentary regarding mobile health has focused on direct regulation leveraging existing laws and regulators such as HIPAA privacy through HHS-OCR or device regulation by the FDA. However, much of the mobile health revolution likely will play out in lightly regulated spaces bereft of most of the privacy, security, and safety rules associated with traditional health care. This article examines the potential for common law liability models to bridge these gaps (even on a temporary basis). Part II of this paper provides an introduction to the terminology used, and presents a brief typology of the apps appearing in the health care space. Part III discusses the potential liability of physicians and other health care professionals. Part IV discusses the potential liability of institutional health care providers such as hospitals (that, in many cases is dependent upon the finding of fault in an individual professional). Part V discusses the applicability of product liability to mobile health developers and vendors. Part VI explains some of the issues that may arise when patients or consumers seek damages following privacy or security breaches. The survey concludes by noting that regulation by litigation may be a significant force in the app and wearable space during a period of light regulation by traditional regulators. This is a conclusion that is unlikely to cheer either health care providers or app developers; given that the indeterminacy associated with common law litigation is only exacerbated when applied to novel or emerging technologies