The Effects of Group-Based Context Personalization on Learning Outcomes and Motivation

The rise of online course enrollments in higher education has highlighted the need to establish and validate effective online instructional strategies focused on improving learning outcomes and affective responses towards instruction. One such strategy, group-based context personalization, frames instructional materials within contexts relevant to shared interests among groups of students. This study sought to investigate the effects of group-based context personalization on learning outcomes and motivation towards the instruction when materials were contextualized based on a learner’s academic major. This study employed a true experimental design to explore the effects of group-based context personalization on learning outcomes and motivation for 20 undergraduate fashion merchandising majors enrolled in a four-year institution in the East Central Region of the U.S. Participants were randomly assigned to either the personalization or non-personalization group. The personalization group received an online unit on fair use and copyright contextualized with fashion merchandising examples, while the non-personalization group received the same instructional materials but with general, education-related examples. Both groups completed Keller’s (2010) Instructional Materials Motivation Survey and a posttest that consisted of recall, general transfer, and fashion merchandising-related transfer questions. This study found no significant between-groups differences on learning outcomes or motivation towards the instruction, though the within-groups posttest performance on general education questions did approach significance over performance on fashion merchandising transfer questions. Suggestions for future research and implementation of group-based context personalization instructional strategies are provided

The Utilization of Instructional Technologies to Augment Traditional Instructional Strategies Within Online Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Programs

Researchers have categorized the methods used to teach entrepreneurship in a face-to-face delivery mode. However, little research has examined methods used for teaching entrepreneurship online. Accordingly, this paper surveys faculty and program chairs at universities that offer online entrepreneurship courses in order to establish a baseline of instructional strategies used within online entrepreneurial education. Since extant literature on effective entrepreneurial teaching methods emphasize the inclusion of entrepreneurship exercises to be experiential and creative, the authors build upon their survey baseline by suggesting five typical activities from the online canon and re-purpose them to increase the experiential nature of such exercises

Evaluating Self-Efficacy Pertaining to Cybersecurity for Small Businesses

Small businesses are easy victims of cyberattacks due to their limited resources and insufficient training. Furthermore, many small business owners’ attitudes diminish their need for safeguards because they think that they are not likely to be attacked. Yet, small businesses experience Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks, phishing, vishing, and tail gating as well as theft of confidential information and hardware. Consequently, numerous small businesses close or experience detrimental results -- loss of consumer trust, lawsuits, credit monitoring fees, tarnished reputations, and lost operational costs. Since past research demonstrated that training positively impacts self-efficacy, this paper explores the effects of cybersecurity training on participants’ self-efficacy towards small business cybersecurity practices. Survey participants were face-to-face and virtual attendees at a public university’s Cybersecurity for Small Businesses Conference. To evaluate the attendees’ perceived self- efficacy, a pre-and post-survey included cybersecurity questions with demographic questions. The results show a significant difference in scores for overall cybersecurity self-efficacy before and after such training