Frozen in Time? Exploring Faith-based Admission Standards in Christian Higher Education

Low enrollment is a significant problem in small Christian liberal arts colleges. It is my position that addressing the adaptive challenge of organizational identity will create an inclusive, accessible, and relevant faith-based college community which appeals to applicants and thereby grow enrollment. Drawing on process organization theory, situated learning theory, and adaptive leadership theory, I propose in this organizational improvement plan a change process enacted by a community of practice to foster sensemaking about organizational identity through college admissions work. This plan identifies portfolio-based admissions and critical policy analysis as ways to invite applicants to demonstrate their strengths; the approaches honour individual faith practice and foster a sense of belonging during the admissions process. The community of practice advances continuous improvement and innovation in the change implementation plan and creates space for varying degrees of stakeholder change readiness in the process

Assessment of an enterprise employee portal using dashboard monitoring system: a case study

A portal is a browser-based application that provides a web platform for users to improve inter-department collaboration and customer service. Portals are classified either as internal facing portals or external public facing portals. This study addresses the problems facing an internal portal related to its contents, functions and usability and provides a list of essential contents and functions that it should include through integrating theories and industry best practices. The theory framework is based on literature review and the industry best practices are based on the analysis of a number of internal portals of companies used as case studies. These two were compared to develop an information mapping grid to identify gaps between theories and practices. A case company was used to uncover additional insights on employee portal content and functionalities through the analysis of actual and perceived user portal usage. The results were then compared using an information mapping grid to derive a set of content and functionalities to improve usability of an internal employee portal. Results of this study indicate that customization and personalization is an important feature of an employee portal, however, features pertaining to communication and collaboration support, search support, help system and employee self-services appear to be more important in practice. The information mapping grid derived, the data warehouse architecture developed and the Dashboard Monitoring systems created to assess usability of an employee portal are applicable to similar enterprises --Abstract, page iii

SWA-KMDLS: An Enhanced e-Learning Management System Using Semantic Web and Knowledge Management Technology

In this era of knowledge economy in which knowledge have become the most precious resource, surveys have shown that e-Learning has been on the increasing trend in various organizations including, among others, education and corporate. The use of e-Learning is not only aim to acquire knowledge but also to maintain competitiveness and advantages for individuals or organizations. However, the early promise of e-Learning has yet to be fully realized, as it has been no more than a handout being published online, coupled with simple multiple-choice quizzes. The emerging of e-Learning 2.0 that is empowered by Web 2.0 technology still hardly overcome common problem such as information overload and poor content aggregation in a highly increasing number of learning objects in an e-Learning Management System (LMS) environment. The aim of this research study is to exploit the Semantic Web (SW) and Knowledge Management (KM) technology; the two emerging and promising technology to enhance the existing LMS. The proposed system is named as Semantic Web Aware-Knowledge Management Driven e-Learning System (SWA-KMDLS). An Ontology approach that is the backbone of SW and KM is introduced for managing knowledge especially from learning object and developing automated question answering system (Aquas) with expert locator in SWA-KMDLS. The METHONTOLOGY methodology is selected to develop the Ontology in this research work. The potential of SW and KM technology is identified in this research finding which will benefit e-Learning developer to develop e-Learning system especially with social constructivist pedagogical approach from the point of view of KM framework and SW environment. The (semi-) automatic ontological knowledge base construction system (SAOKBCS) has contributed to knowledge extraction from learning object semiautomatically whilst the Aquas with expert locator has facilitated knowledge retrieval that encourages knowledge sharing in e-Learning environment. The experiment conducted has shown that the SAOKBCS can extract concept that is the main component of Ontology from text learning object with precision of 86.67%, thus saving the expert time and effort to build Ontology manually. Additionally the experiment on Aquas has shown that more than 80% of users are satisfied with answers provided by the system. The expert locator framework can also improve the performance of Aquas in the future usage. Keywords: semantic web aware – knowledge e-Learning Management System (SWAKMDLS), semi-automatic ontological knowledge base construction system (SAOKBCS), automated question answering system (Aquas), Ontology, expert locator

Social control in online communities of consumption: a framework for community management

Online communities of consumption (OCCs) represent highly diverse groups of consumers whose interests are not always aligned. Social control in OCCs aims to effectively manage problems arising from this heterogeneity. Extant literature on social control in OCCs is fragmented as some studies focus on the principles of social control, while others focus on the implementation. Moreover, the domain is undertheorized. This article integrates the disparate literature on social control in OCCs providing a first unified conceptualization of the topic. The authors conceptualize social control as a system, or configuration, of moderation practices. Moderation practices are executed during interactions operating under different governance structures (market, hierarchy, and clan) and serving different purposes (interaction initiation, maintenance, and termination). From this conceptualization, important areas of future research emerge and research questions are developed. The framework also serves as a community management tool for OCC managers, enabling the diagnosis of social control problems and the elaboration of strategies and tactics to address them