Institutions of higher education are being called upon to provide a more robust pathway to a college degree and improve upon the advanced workforce for the needs of the 21st century. While active ...collaborative learning environments have been encouraged in higher education to improve student engagement, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to connecting the two research areas of collaborative learning and student intention to persist. This research fills this gap by creating and conducting research to examine a model that measures the factors that significantly influence a student's persistence in a virtual collaborative learning environment. The model examines how collaborative learning, campus connectedness, sense of community, organizational commitment, and turnover intention influence student persistence. The model was tested using a sample of students who participated in a virtual learning community (VLC) and the results suggest that all but one of the factors were found to significantly influence student persistence, with the final factor dependent on the number of hours of system usage. We discuss the implications of the research and the model for team-based theory and organizational practice in education and teamwork.
•Factors influencing persistence in a virtual collaborative learning environment.•Hypothesized model found to effectively measure persistence.•Hours of system usage found to effect relationships in the model.
•Many individuals feel learned helplessness with many aspects of today’s society.•Previous measures have validity, reliability, and predictive validity problems.•We use 1681 subjects in 12 samples to ...rigorously develop a new scale.•LHAS shows considerable improvement in validity and reliability.
Research illustrates that attribution theory holds untapped potential for researching problems in management and social science. This potential exists partly due to the lack of a concise measurement instrument. Previous measures, though suitable for their respective tasks, each come with a set of limitations. We suggest that one of these limitations, namely psychometric issues, may be a factor inhibiting use of attribution theory in the business domain. In answer to the call to increase the use of attribution theory we create a new set of scales to provide a stable, parsimonious instrument for measuring attribution style. Twelve sections of four courses across ten semesters were used to develop the scales and test them across groups and time. The final result is a new measurement tool, the Learned Helplessness Attribution Scale (LHAS), that demonstrates solid psychometric properties.
Engineering and technology educators continually strive for realistic, hands‐on laboratory exercises to enhance their students’ learning. This research describes the redesign of an undergraduate ...introductory computer networking course to include new weekly virtual laboratory assignments that culminate in a ‘real world’ final project of configuring a ‘corporate’ network. The use of an Internet testbed technology named ISEAGE allows students to design and implement fully functional networks using public IP space that is contained in the testbed. To the students, it appears as if they were directly connected to the Internet while still being protected. This paper shows that ‘real world’ projects using virtual lab technology can have a positive effect both on objective networking knowledge, as well as subjective self‐assessments of self‐efficacy with regard to implementing the technology. It also demonstrates that ‘real world’ final projects encourage student thinking at upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
Computer and engineering courses require hands‐on labs.
Due to online enrollment and the current COVID pandemic, these hands‐on labs need to be taught virtually.
What this paper adds
We detail a virtual lab environment for teaching hands‐on skills in computer networking.
We longitudinally assess the virtual lab technology across multiple institutions.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Other practitioners can implement this same technology for teaching hands‐on networking concepts virtually.
•Studied the impact of sample size on an implicit network inferred using Phi Correlation coefficient and Ochiai coefficient.•Illustrated using a network of diseases developed using 22.1 Million ...patient records.•Found Ochiai coefficient to be less sensitive to the sample size than Phi Correlation coefficient.•The betweenness centrality was most affected by the sample size.
Some networks are explicit where members make direct connections (e.g. Facebook network), whereas other networks are implicit (e.g. co-citation network) in which an edge between two nodes is inferred using a similarity index. Choosing the right index to infer connections in an implicit/inferred network is important because conclusions can be biased if a network does not represent true relationships. In this study, we compared two indexes: Phi Correlation Coefficient (PCC) and Ochiai Coefficient (Och) based on their sensitivity to the sample size of transactions from where the network is inferred. For demonstration, we used an implicit network, called a comorbidity network, developed from health records of 22.1 million patients. The networks were compared based on their overall topologies and node centralities. Results showed that the network formed using Och was more robust to the sample size than PCC. The network using Och followed a small-world topology irrespective of the sample size whereas the structure of a network using PCC was inconsistent. Regarding node centralities, the betweenness centrality was most affected by the sample size. Our results lead us to recommend Och over PCC.
Recently video conferencing has become a daily part of many lives for social interaction, education, work, and various other activities. Research suggests that the use of webcams during these ...interactions increases the richness of the interaction and therefore impacts the overall quality of the videoconference. Given this, understanding what drives individual choice to display or not display their webcam is important to understand. This research investigates the impact of facial attractiveness in the decision of an individual to display their webcam during a videoconference. A within-subjects experiment of 93 subjects across four treatments is used for this research. Results show that while men are driven by self-views of their own facial attractiveness, women are instead driven by their beliefs about what others think of their facial attractiveness. This provides important information for those who wish to create a richer interaction for the widespread use of videoconferencing tools.
Social engineering is a large problem in our modern technological world, but while conceptually understood, it is harder to teach compared to traditional pen testing techniques. This research details ...a class project where students implemented a phishing exercise against real-world targets. Through cooperation with an external corporate partner, students learned the legal, technical, behavioral, analysis, and reporting aspects of social engineering. The outcome provided both usable data for a real-world corporation as well as valuable educational experience for the students.
With an excess of interconnected devices, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies offer an exciting area for information systems researchers; however, the inherently physical nature of IoT makes it ...difficult to provide hands-on laboratory exercises to remote students. Research suggests that enactive mastery provides the greatest educational improvement to individual self-efficacy, yet not all enactive experiences are the same, certainly not when individuals have no means of accessing materials physically. Through the use of a virtual laboratory and home automation IoT technology, we develop a method to teach IoT in remote settings where students can experience hands-on IoT training in remote settings. We experimentally evaluate the virtual laboratory by comparing student outcomes in a traditional setting using physical materials to those using the virtual laboratory. Results indicate that while student perceptions were lower for students using the virtual laboratory, this virtual laboratory was successful in offering students the means to perform hands-on IoT automation, with these students achieving equivalent performance metrics to those utilizing a traditional physical laboratory.
Participation in sponsored online co-creation is said to be driven primarily by an individual's intrinsic motivation, which in turn may be crowded-out, or undermined by financial incentives. The ...effect of financial incentives, specifically in a company-sponsored online co-creation brainstorming (COCB) context, however, remains unexplored. In this study, we use LEGO Ideas, a prominent COCB, as an exemplar and employ a between-subjects randomized experimental design to examine the effect of different types of financial incentives on intrinsic motivation's impact on participation intention in a COCB context, either directly or indirectly through personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology. Our findings suggest that focused financial incentives, representing situations where financial rewards are administered exclusively on the basis of excellent performance, offer the best outcome for predicting participation intention. These findings contribute to our knowledge of the use of financial incentives in sponsored online co-creation generally, and specifically in COCBs.
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