Destination Image on the DMO's Platforms: Official Website and Social Media

Tourists usually configure and develop ideas about possible destinations based on information previously gathered from both social media and the official web of the destination management organization (DMO). In spite of the relevance of said information sources, there have not been many studies evaluating how these different sources influence the destination image. This research proposes a model intended to explain the image creation process of a destination taking into account both the DMO’s online platforms and the perceived psychological distance. The proposed model is tested with an empirical study including a questionnaire which collects data from 264 participants. The validity of the model is reviewed through PLS analysis. Results show that the psychological distance does not influence the overall destination image. In addition, the overall destination image can be estimated to a larger extent when tourists approach social media as their main source of information. Implications and conclusions are discussed.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Sustainable eLearning in a Changing Landscape: A Scoping Study (SeLScope)

The report begins by exploring the concept of sustainable e-learning - defining it and establishing its characteristics in the context of Higher Education. To ensure a sound and systematic process, the review is informed by a five-phase methodological framework for scoping reviews by Arksey and O'Malley (2005). Examples and perspectives on the concept of sustainable e-learning are summarised and key factors impacting on sustainability are abstracted. highlights potential gaps and suggests directions for further research on the topic

Exploring, understanding, then designing: twitter users’ sharing behavior for minor safety incidents

Social media has become an integral part of human lives. Social media users resort to these platforms for various reasons. Users of these platforms spend a lot of time creating, reading, and sharing content, therefore, providing a wealth of available information for everyone to use. The research community has taken advantage of this and produced many publications that allow us to better understand human behavior. An important subject that is sometimes discussed and shared on social media is public safety. In the past, Twitter users have used the platform to share incidents, share information about incidents, victims and perpetrators, and used it to provide help in distressed locations after an attack or after a natural disaster. Public safety officials also used Twitter to disseminate information to maintain and improve safety and seek information from the crowds. The previous focus of the research is mainly on significant public safety incidents; but, incidents with less severity matter too. The focus of this dissertation is on minor incidents and the aim is to understand what motivates social media users to share those incidents to maintain and increase public safety through design suggestions.This dissertation is comprised of three completed studies. The first study attempts to understand motivations to share public safety incidents on social media under the collective action theory lens. Collective action theory assumes that rational people will not participate in a public good unless there is a special incentive or an external motivation for them. In this study, public safety is considered as the public good. This study tests people’s willingness to share incidents on social media if: the victim is someone they know, if the location of the incident is close, and if there is some coercion to influence users willingness to share. General support is found for the hypotheses and collective action theory.In the second study, the focus is on internal motivations that stem from being prosocial. An established scale that measures six different traits of prosocial behavior is used. It is hypothesizes that prosocial behavior is positively related to decisions to share incidents on social media. The study also tests other mediating variables, namely: following news outlets on Twitter, following public safety officials on social media, frequency of tweeting/retweeting. Partial support for prosocial tendencies effect on decisions to share is found. The study also discoveres that the three mediating variables (number of public safety official accounts followed, news exposure on social media, and tweet/retweet frequency) fully mediates the relationship and that they have a significant positive effect on decisions to share. The third and final study complements the previous two and helps conclude the previous findings. A 2X2X2 online experiment design is conducted. The three manipulations are the availability of location information, platform authority availability, and availability of sender authority. The study hypothesizes that the three interventions will produce a significant positive relationship with decisions to share on Twitter. It is found that location information has no effect on sharing minor incidents on Twitter, however, participants are more likely to use a fictitious button that increases local exposure to minor public safety tweets. It is also found that the authority of the sender has a significant effect on decisions to share. On the other hand, platform authority does not show an effect on decisions to share public safety incidents on Twitter

Anxiety: An Epidemic Through the Lens of Social Media

Anxiety: An Epidemic was originally inspired by the mental health crisis in my hometown, Palo Alto, California, and evolved to specifically focus on social media-related anxiety. I examined the question: How has social media evolved over the last decade and what effect does the proliferation of social media have on the young adult population? I hypothesized that social media would have a predominately negative effect, especially on young women, and set out to create a theatrical piece inspired by my research. In my meta-analysis of studies conducted, I found that more data needs to be collected on the relatively new phenomena surrounding social media usage both as positive and negative forces. The research I conducted inspired two new artistic works: a physical theatre piece entitled MASKS: An Ode to Young Women, and a children’s story entitled “The King Who Lost His Smile” (both artistic works can be found in full in appendix A). I discovered that while more research needs to be conducted to definitively find if social media usage has a predominantly positive or negative effect, the artistic works I created can serve as a forum to start important conversations between young adults and their communities at large about their experiences with anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Social Distance and Information Avoidance in Public Security Events: A Dual Involvement Perspective

With the large spread of information thanks to ICT, public security events are increasingly focused on by the public. But meanwhile, the phenomenon of people’s information avoidance in these events still exists and even becomes more prominent. However, existing studies on information avoidance have ignored such an important context (i.e., public security event) and the influence of people’s perceptions of social relationship. To fill the gaps, we develop a model to explore the influence of social distance on information avoidance through two opposite mechanisms from a dual involvement perspective, perceived relevance and negative affect, in the context of public security events. We also consider self-efficacy’s moderating role to identify the boundary conditions. A scenario-based survey with college students was conducted to test the proposed research model. Finally, theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed

Developing sustainable business models for institutions’ provision of open educational resources: Learning from OpenLearn users’ motivations and experiences

Universities across the globe have, for some time, been exploring the possibilities for achieving public benefit and generating business and visibility through releasing and sharing open educational resources (OER). Many have written about the need to develop sustainable and profitable business models around the production and release of OER. Downes (2006), for example, has questioned the financial sustainability of OER production at scale. Many of the proposed business models focus on OER’s value in generating revenue and detractors of OER have questioned whether they are in competition with formal education. This paper reports on a study intended to broaden the conversation about OER business models to consider the motivations and experiences of OER users as the basis for making a better informed decision about whether OER and formal learning are competitive or complementary with each other. The study focused on OpenLearn - the Open University’s (OU) web-based platform for OER, which hosts hundreds of online courses and videos and is accessed by over 3,000,000 users a year. A large scale survey and follow-up interviews with OpenLearn users worldwide revealed that university provided OER can offer learners a bridge to formal education, allowing them to try out a subject before registering on a formal course and to build confidence in their abilities as learners. In addition, it was found that using OER during formal paid-for study can improve learners’ performance and self-reliance, leading to increased retention and satisfaction with the learning experience

Open educational resources for all? Comparing user motivations and characteristics across The Open University’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform.

With the rise in access to mobile multimedia devices, educational institutions have exploited the iTunes U platform as an additional channel to provide free educational resources with the aim of profile-raising and breaking down barriers to education. For those prepared to invest in content preparation, it is possible to produce interactive, portable material that can be made available globally. Commentators have questioned both the financial implications for platform-specific content production, and the availability of devices for learners to access it (Osborne, 2012). The Open University (OU) makes its free educational resources available on iTunes U and via its web-based open educational resources (OER) platform, OpenLearn. The OU’s OER on iTunes U reached the 60 million download mark in 2013; its OpenLearn platform boasts 27 million unique visitors since 2006. This paper reports the results of a large-scale study of users of the OU’s iTunes U channel and OpenLearn platform. A survey of several thousand users revealed key differences in demographics between those accessing OER via the web and via iTunes U. In addition, the data allowed comparison between three groups: formal learners, informal learners and educators. The study raises questions about whether university-provided OER meet the needs of users and makes recommendations for how content can be modified to suit their needs. As the publishing of OER becomes core to business, we reflect on reasons why understanding users’ motivations and demographics is vital, allowing for needs-led resource provision and content that is adapted to best achieve learner satisfaction, and to deliver institutions’ social mission

Learning within Digital Media: Investigating the Relationships Between Student Citation Networks, Assignment Structures, and Learning Outcomes

Students are comfortable sharing digital content with others, yet the effect of sharing of digital media for learning remains largely unexplored. Building on research in social network analysis and learning analytics, this research explores the use and sharing of digital media in learning activities, analyzing the effects of the design of the learning activities on the resulting networks of students and their cited resources, and exploring relationships between attributes of these citation networks and students’ perceptions of the learning outcomes. Results suggest that the extent to which an assignment is well-structured and converges towards a single solution positively influences the density and clustering coefficient of the resulting citation network, and that these network measures in turn have a positive influence on students’ perceptions of learning from the assignment