Faculty Members’ Attitudes Toward Interdisciplinary Studies in the College of Education at Sultan Qaboos University

In view of the inability of many specialized studies and research to solve the complex problems of human societies due to their limited and narrow areas, it has become necessary to re-consider the principles of knowledge management, the distribution of knowledge in specialized, scientific disciplines, and its dissemination and ways of research. Therefore, this study aims to examine the attitudes faculty members of the College of Education have towards interdisciplinary studies. It also attempts to show the statistical significance (α =0.05) between faculty members’ attitudes toward interdisciplinary studies based on gender and years of experience. The study aims to determine as well the disciplines that faculty members of the College of Education want to research interdisciplinarily. This study adopted the use of the descriptive approach through the development of a questionnaire that included (48) items. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were estimated using the Chronbach-Alpha reliability coefficient which was (0.898). The results of the study showed that the highest degree of trends among faculty members in the College of Education toward interdisciplinary research was recorded in favor of collaborative research, followed by the desire to conduct interdisciplinary research, then the importance of interdisciplinary research, and finally the implementation of interdisciplinary research. The results also show that there were no statistically significant differences according to the gender of the sample and their number of years of experience. Based on these results, many recommendations and suggestions were proposed

An empirical study on the e-learning acceptance among the Finnish labor

Background and objectives: Utilization of e-learning environments and applications in business context has increased rapidly. International organizations, as well as local companies, allocate more resources to personnel development by using e-learning trainings. e-learning provides cost effective training possibilities and therefore it gives a good opportunity for employees to gain knowledge regardless of place and time. e-learning business is predicted to grow approximately eight percent annually during next few years. In addition, worth of global e-learning business will reach total value of 50 billion US dollars. This creates business possibilities both for the organization with training needs and the system providers. Drive for this research was originated from the need to identify those factors that has an effect towards e-learning attitudes and acceptance of Finnish labor. Aim of this study was to provide structural model, based on the existing theories, which helps to evaluate the impact of employees' background and system environment towards user acceptance. Methodology and data collection: Research data was collected by using Webropol survey software and survey was sent via email to 406 recipients. Survey yielded overall 115 responses, which were used to test created hypotheses. Hypotheses were based on existing theories but also fitted to the e-learning context. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to evaluate measurement model, which was followed by final path model. After constructs, validity, reliability and model fit were evaluated (SPSS Amos 22) final model was tested with suggested thresholds and good fit values. It can be concluded, that validity and reliability meet the suggested satisfactory rate. Results: The results of this research indicates that perceived usefulness, in terms of e-learning participation, is one of the most important factors when attitudes toward system usage is under evaluation. System usability (perceived ease of use) has also strong influence on the employee feeling of increasing job output. Previous theories suggest that usage background plays an important role in technology acceptance. In addition, role of perceived usefulness and system usability depends on the level of voluntariness. One identified limitation of this study was the lack of voluntariness distribution. Great majority of respondents answered that their e-learning participation was and will be voluntary

Linguistic complexity of arabic language: a semantic analysis of antonymous homonyms in the holy Qur'ān

Homonymy, is one of the two main sub-divisions of lexical ambiguity that represents the complex nature of form and context of the Qur'anic Arabic which presents a challenge in the translation process. Since Qur'anic discourse abounds with homonymic expressions whose meaning is derived from the context, the translators of the Qur'an should undertake a demanding task decoding the intended meanings. The present paper aims at clarifying some linguistic complexities in some verses of the Qur'ān which may pose difficulty to translators of the holy book most especially those who are not familiar with antonymous homonyms in Arabic language. The reason is that antonymous homonyms are special features of the Qurʾanic Arabic language. It may be viewed as one of the stylistic feature of the Qur'an. Therefore, classification of these linguistic complexity is offered and the samples of these classifications from the Holy Qur'ān are mentioned in relation to antonymous homonyms. Samples of translated Qur'an are compared in order to ascertain the qualities of translations and English translation strategies of the stated verses