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The study aims to examine the validity of the gender affinity effect on social media throughout election campaigns.

This paper examines the role of gender in political discourse, using citizens' conversations on Facebook in the days leading up to Israel's 2021 elections as its case study. The analysis measured the engagement generated by male and female politicians in citizens' publicly open Facebook discussions (N = 1875) using a trend-tracking software. The analysis uses t-tests to examine differences in engagement between conversations about male versus female politicians and between posts written by male versus female authors. In addition, a two-way ANOVA analysis was conducted in an attempt to understand the shared impact of both the politicians' gender and posts authors' gender on the posts' engagement.

The study reveals that although more posts discuss male politicians, posts dealing with female politicians expressed significantly more support towards those politicians. The analysis also highlights that women tend to write more supportive posts and that most of their posts deal with female politicians. Furthermore, interaction effect analysis revealed that women's posts about female politicians generate more engagement in terms of likes, comments and number of participants than posts written by women that deal with male politicians.

The findings should encourage women politicians to run their campaigns via social media.

The study presents the first social media analysis for gender affinity effect and highlights the importance of the effect in online political communication studies.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-04-2022-0199

Despite the ability of podcasts to bring free quality content to the masses, studies found that podcast consumption have been identified mostly with the elite class, thus increasing knowledge gaps and digital divides. This study aims to examine whether this trend extends to non-elitist podcast genres by providing the first analysis of sport podcast demographics and uses and gratifications.

A survey was conducted among Israel’s three most popular sport podcast listeners (N = 503), examining the listeners’ demographics, consumption patterns and uses and gratifications driving them to listen to the podcast.

The analysis reveals that most listeners are secular millennials males with above average income, highlighting the elitist nature of sport podcast consumers. The analysis further revealed that information-rich groups were more likely to tune in for information acquisition whereas other groups used it more for entertainment and escapist purposes.

For policy makers and educators who wish to promote podcast-based initiatives to narrow social gaps, the analysis strengthens the notion that the podcast platform mostly attracts those who are already information rich and thus increase knowledge gaps and digital divides. For sport broadcasters, the analysis illuminates sport podcasts audiences’ demographics and their uses of the platform.

The study reflects that the podcast platform is identified with elitist listening even in non-elitist genres; thus it further increases the already wide knowledge gap and digital divides promoted by the advent of the podcast platform.

The study is the first to highlight the elitist nature of sport podcast listeners’ demographics, indicating that the podcast platform increases the knowledge gap also even across non-elitist content genres such as sport content.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2021-0684

The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic forced universities to hastily transition to eLearning on a mass scale, necessitating the identification of populations who are more challenged by the transition. This study aims to identify how students’ level of introversion/extraversion and digital literacy come to play in their satisfaction with the eLearning environment.

The analysis examined 272 Israeli students who moved from a face-to-face learning environment to a Zoom learning environment between March–July 2020, following the outbreak of the pandemic. All the participants completed two rounds of surveys, and 62 of the 272 participants were then interviewed, and their social network was mapped using a sociogram.

Findings indicated that, in accordance with the “poor get richer” hypothesis, introverts expressed more satisfaction from the transition to the video-conferencing Zoom platform than extraverts. In addition, for highly introverted people, high digital literacy was significantly associated with increased course satisfaction, whereas for highly extraverted people, a high number of social ties with peers from the course was associated with course satisfaction.

As expected, the study’s findings shows that there is no “one size fits all” approach for online learning. Learners with different personalities can benefit from learning environments that foster greater satisfaction with the learning experience. Online platforms can, and should, be designed in a way that offers this needed personalization, and this study provides initial principles that can inform such personalization.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-01-2023-0028

The purpose of this research is to inspect the perceptions of MBA students regarding learning through podcasts. The author's goals are to reveal the students' attitudes toward the use of podcasts as a key learning tool in a graduate academic course, to examine the learning efficacy in this mode of learning, to inspect students' opinions regarding flexibility in learning with podcasts and to examine whether there is a different reference to podcasts as a mid-term assignment vs podcasts as a substitute for lectures.

This paper examines the learning attitudes and effectiveness of postgraduate students in business administration toward combining podcasts as an e-Learning tool. This paper also explores the flexibility of this kind of asynchronous learning. Two types of podcasts for two different pedagogical purposes were examined in the study, one as a team mid-term assignment and second as recorded lectures. The main results of this study provide significant evidence that previous experience in listening to podcasts on the Internet has a significant impact on learning effectiveness, student attitudes and learning satisfaction while using this technology. In fact, this study establishes that students that are technologically oriented and have prior experience listening to podcasts learn more in the course, have positive attitudes toward podcast technology as a learning tool, have high learning effectiveness and are satisfied with the flexibility of the asynchronous learning process.

The findings state that both in the mid-term assignment and in the course lessons as students listened to podcasts more frequently and gained experience listening to podcasts on the Internet, the students expressed more positive views toward learning using this technology, the students' learning effectiveness was higher and the students were more satisfied with the flexibility made possible by using this asynchronous technology tool of e-Learning. Moreover, the results of the study clearly indicate a positive correlation between listening to the podcast lessons in the course and the effectiveness of learning both in the mid-term assignment and in classes.

This study has some limitations. First, the findings are limited by the relatively small sample, with graduate students in an MBA program, in a course from the field of technological entrepreneurship. Furthermore, in this study, the students had partial freedom to choose the podcast for the students' mid-term assignment from a specific well-known program in the field of entrepreneurship and were not free to choose podcasts from any site available on the Internet. Although this process guided the students to use podcasts from a quality podcast program, the process also reduced the students' choice to some extent.

Academic institutions must provide the appropriate technological infrastructure for the development, creation and recording of quality podcasts by lecturers for students, in addition to training lecturers to teach through podcasts as an integral part of e-Learning advanced tools. Furthermore, institutions must financially incentivize and educationally encourage lecturers to teach at least some of the content in the course using pre-prepared podcasts.

The author's first suggestion to lecturers that wish to use podcasts as learning resources is to familiarize themselves with the technology and resources available to introduce students to the basics of podcasting and to make the students aware of the podcast's benefits. Second, the study highly recommends to integrate podcasts into the teaching curriculum in academia as early as possible in the basic courses, before the students move on to advanced courses in undergraduate studies. In this way, students in advanced courses can make better use of this technology.

As far as the author knows, this is the first study that combined two types of podcasts used for two complementary pedagogical purposes in an academic course: the first, open and available online podcasts as part of a mid-term assignment and the second type of podcasts that are recorded audio lessons as a complete replacement for course lectures. Additionally, the study sharpens the understanding that students' previous experience with technology is of great importance to learning effectiveness, as well as positive opinions and high learning satisfaction.