Supporting sustainable e‐learning

This paper draws upon work carried out within phase one of a national forum for support staff, funded by the UK Learning and Teaching Support Network Generic Centre. It sets out themes in current Learning Technology research within the context of institutional practice. It reports the responses of a range of e‐learning support staff to new developments in the reuse and sharing of Learning Objects. The article highlights tensions across support units, inconsistencies in support provision and confusion over issues concerning different modes of teaching. It also forewarns a growing gap between institutional practice and research in the development of approaches to sustainable e‐learning

Collaborative knowledge management - A construction case study

Due to the new threats and challenges faced by the construction industry today, construction companies must seek new solutions in order to remain ahead of the competition. Knowledge has been identified to be a significant organisational resource, which if used effectively can provide competitive advantage. A lot of emphasis is being put on how to identify, capture and share knowledge in today's organisations. It has been argued over the years that due to the fragmented nature of the construction industry and ad-hoc nature of the construction projects, capture and reuse of valuable knowledge gathered during a construction project pose a challenge. As a result critical mistakes are repeated on projects and construction professionals have to kee

Correlating Architecture Maturity and Enterprise Systems Usage Maturity to Improve Business/IT Alignment

This paper compares concepts of maturity models in the areas of Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Systems Usage. We investigate whether these concepts correlate, overlap and explain each other. The two maturity models are applied in a case study. We conclude that although it is possible to fully relate constructs from both kinds of models, having a mature architecture function in a company does not imply a high Enterprise Systems Usage maturity

Crossing the death valley to transfer environmental decision support systems to the water market

Environmental decision support systems (EDSSs) are attractive tools to cope with the complexity of environmental global challenges. Several thoughtful reviews have analyzed EDSSs to identify the key challenges and best practices for their development. One of the major criticisms is that a wide and generalized use of deployed EDSSs has not been observed. The paper briefly describes and compares four case studies of EDSSs applied to the water domain, where the key aspects involved in the initial conception and the use and transfer evolution that determine the final success or failure of these tools (i.e., market uptake) are identified. Those aspects that contribute to bridging the gap between the EDSS science and the EDSS market are highlighted in the manuscript. Experience suggests that the construction of a successful EDSS should focus significant efforts on crossing the death-valley toward a general use implementation by society (the market) rather than on development.The authors would like to thank the Catalan Water Agency (Agència Catalana de l’Aigua), Besòs River Basin Regional Administration (Consorci per la Defensa de la Conca del Riu Besòs), SISLtech, and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for providing funding (CTM2012-38314-C02-01 and CTM2015-66892-R). LEQUIA, KEMLG, and ICRA were recognized as consolidated research groups by the Catalan Government under the codes 2014-SGR-1168, 2013-SGR-1304 and 2014-SGR-291.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version