A Close Look at Trust Among Team Members in Online Learning Communities

Trust is one of the important factors either fostering or damaging students’ online teamwork learning experience. Building trust among team members has become a necessary step for a successful collaboration experience. The purpose of the article was to understand students’ learning and teamwork experiences and further to investigate the relationships of learner-centered instructions, team trust, and social presence in an online learning community. Also, this article adds to the research on the role of social presence in promoting cognitive and affective trust. The results indicated there were positive correlations between learner-centered instructions and trust, between learner-centered instructions and social presence, and between trust and social presence. The study could provide suggestions for instructors teaching online courses for the implementation of learner-centered instructions and the importance of creating a social presence and building trust for students in a collaborative online learning environment

The Reality of Financing Small Tourism Firms: The Case of Indian Tourism SMEs

mall tourist firms occupy an important place within the Indian tourism industry and make a significant contribution towards gross domestic production. This study investigates access to and finance preferences of SME tourism firms in the Punjab area, India. The study employed a post-positivist research approach depending on semi-structured questionnaires and interviews. The findings confirmed that tourism firms relied on pecking order trajectory, drawing capital from own savings, family and informal lenders, which is consistent with the literature. The study provides a unique insight into issues related to tourism firms and benchmarks findings with SME literature to identify the salient points

Collagen Type I and II Blend Hydrogels for Articular Cartilage Tissue Engineering

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a debilitating condition that affects over 27 million Americans and is defined by degradation in articular cartilage extracellular matrix. Patients suffer from pain and stiffness in the joints associated with the onset of OA. Tissue that is damaged by OA is a major health concern since cartilage tissue has a limited ability to self-repair due to the lack of vasculature in cartilage and low cell content. Tissue engineering seeks to repair damaged cartilage by introducing an optimized combination of cells, scaffold, and bioactive factors that can be transplanted into a patient. Collagen type II is a promising material to repair cartilage defects since it is a major component of articular cartilage and plays a key role in chondrocyte function. This work harnesses the biological activity of collagen type II and the superior mechanical properties of collagen type I by characterizing gels made of collagen type I and II blends (1:0, 3:1, 1:1, 1:3, and 0:1). The collagen blend hydrogels were able to incorporate both types of collagen, chondroitin sulfate (CS), and hyaluronic acid. Cryo-scanning electron microscopy images showed that the 3:1 ratio of collagen type I to type II gels had a lower void space percentage (36.4%) than the 1:1 gels (46.5%). The complex modulus was larger for the 3:1 gels (G* = 5.0 Pa) compared to the 1:1 gels (G* = 1.2 Pa). The 3:1 blend consistently formed gels with superior mechanical properties compared to the other blends and showed the potential to be implemented as a scaffold for articular cartilage engineering. Building on the characterization work, this study examined the chondrogenic differentiation of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) embedded within a 3:1 collagen type I to II blend (Col I/II) hydrogel or an all collagen type I (Col I) hydrogel. Glycosaminoglycan (GAG) production in Col I/II hydrogels was statistically higher than in Col I hydrogels or pellet culture, and these results suggested that adding collagen type II promoted GAG production. Col I/II hydrogels had statistically lower alkaline phosphatase (AP) activity than pellets cultured in chondrogenic medium. The ability of MSCs encapsulated in Col I/II hydrogels to repair cartilage defects was investigated by creating two defects in the femurs of rabbits. After 13 weeks, histochemical staining suggested that Col I/II blend hydrogels provided favorable conditions for cartilage repair. Histological scoring revealed a statistically higher cartilage repair score for the Col I/II hydrogels compared to either the Col I hydrogels or empty defect controls. Results from this study suggest that there is clinical value in the cartilage repair capabilities of our Col I/II hydrogel with encapsulated MSCs. There are many examples of collagen hydrogels with incorporated CS here the addition of CS has been shown to improve scaffolds for articular cartilage tissue engineering. Our final study investigated the use of CS with attached collagen binding peptides to retain, without the use of chemical crosslinking, matrix molecules and better recapitulate aspects of native cartilage in a Col I/II hydrogel with encapsulated MSCs. The number of SILY peptides attached to a CS backbone was varied to create 3 different molecules: CS-10SILY, CS-15SILY, and CS-20SILY, with 10, 15, and 20 denoting the number of SILY peptides attached to CS. As CS retention, average fibril diameter, and mechanical properties are altered by the addition of different CS-SILY molecules, the physical properties of the desired Col I/II hydrogel can be tuned by adjusting the amount of SILY peptides attached to the CS backbone. In addition, the scaffolds that contained CS-10SILY, CS-15SILY, and CS-20SILY had higher GAG production which suggests better differentiation of MSCs into chondrocytes in scaffolds that contain a CS-SILY molecule. Taken together, these results suggested that the addition of a CS-SILY molecule to a Col I/II hydrogel with encapsulated MSCs has the potential to promote cartilage repair

Impact of Strain Engineering on Nanoscale Strained III–V PMOSFETs

Stress distributions in the strained InGaAs PMOSFET with source/drain (S/D) stressors for various lengths and widths were studied with 3D stress simulations. The resulting mobility improvement was analyzed. Compressive stress along the transport direction was found to dominate the hole mobility improvement for the wide width devices. Stress along the vertical direction perpendicular to the gate oxide was found to affect the mobility the least, while stress along the width direction enhanced in the middle wide width region. The impact of channel width and length on performance improvements such as the mobility gain was analyzed using the Kubo-Greenwood formalism accounting for nonpolar hole-phonon scattering (acoustic and optical), surface roughness scattering, polar phonon scattering, alloy scattering and remote phonon scattering. The novelty of this paper is studying the impact of channel width and length on the performance of InGaAs PMOSFET such as mobility and exploring physical insight for scaling the future III–V CMOS devices