Supporting Learner-Content Interaction on Autodidactic Field Trips through Mobile Learning Applications

The increasing number of university students in Europe leads to an increasing student-to-lecturer ratio which finally results in a lower quality of studying experience. Thus, lecturers have to find new possibilities to adapt to the changing circumstances. This is particularly important in disciplines of natural sciences, as they integrate field trips in their curriculum, which require small groups of students. To be able to offer field trips in the future, one possible solution is to combine them with mobile learning application to enable autodidactic field trips. As prior research already showed that mobile learning applications can support autodidactic activities in education, the aim of this study is to design and develop a mobile learning application to support field trips. The existing research about designing such applications is limited, especially regarding needed requirements. With the aim of deducing meta-requirements and design principles for such applications, we apply the design science approach

The Quest for Environmental Information - Towards a Mobile Application for GHG Emission Tracking in Meat Production Processes

In the context of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, especially the meat processing industry is under pressure by the society to report their product’s environmental impact, which is ten times higher than for products from vegetable origin. However, meat processing companies struggle with the collection and provision of detailed data, as production processes are complex and variable. Recent research showed that automated sensor systems could provide environment relevant information. Nonetheless, these sensors are not diffused in practice. One solution is the usage of mobile devices in production processes to collect environmental data for product carbon footprints. In this study, we present an action design research project, developing a mobile application for GHG emission data collection, using OCR algorithms for automated sensor read-out tasks. An evaluation showed that practitioners perceive the application to be efficient, thus coping with missing automated sensor systems for GHG emission reporting processes

How to Avoid Empty Chairs in IT Divisions? IS Supported Succession Management to Control Development and Retention of IT Professionals

The IT profession possesses two main characteristics: an imbalance between demanded and available IT professionals, and a fast technological change, which constantly requires new IT competences. Hence, medium and large organizations that heavily rely on IT need methods to retain and develop the employees of their IT divisions in order to avoid vacancies. However, prior scientific research only examines this problem from an individual perspective, but it remains unknown how organizations can control the development and retention of IT professionals. In this paper, we reveal how IS supported succession management can help to control the development and retention of IT professionals. Therefore, we employ an exploratory interview study among 21 organizations. Our results indicate that succession management can be used to control the development and retention of IT professionals. Moreover, an IS support of succession management allows to extend the target group of IT professionals while costs are hold down