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Introduction: Numerous decision-making situations are faced in education where Artificial Intelligence may be prevalent as a decision-making support tool to capture streams of learners’ behaviours.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to understand the role of AI in student performance assessment and explore the future role of AI in educational performance assessment.

Scope: The study tries to understand the adaptability of AI in the education sector for supporting the educator in automating assessment. It supports the educator to concentrate on core teaching-learning activities.

Objectives: To understand the AI adaption for educational assessment, the positives and negatives of confidential data collections, and challenges for implementation from the view of various stakeholders.

Methodology: The study is conceptual, and information has been collected from sources comprised of expert interactions, research publications, survey and Industry reports.

Findings: The use of AI in student performance assessment has helped in early predictions for the activities to be adopted by educators. Results of AI evaluations give the data that may be combined and understood to create visuals.

Research Implications: AI-based analytics helps in fast decision-making and adapting the teaching curriculum’s fast-changing industry needs. Students’ abilities, such as participation and resilience, and qualities, such as confidence and drive, may be appraised using AI assessment systems.

Theoretical Implication: Artificial intelligence-based evaluation gives instructors, students, and parents a continuous opinion on how students learn, the help they require, and their progress towards their learning objectives.

As the size of the population is growing and the capacity of the planet Earth is limited, human beings are searching for sustainable and technology-enabled solutions to support society, ecology and economy. One of the solutions has been developing smart sustainable cities. Smart sustainable cities are cities as systems, where their infrastructure, different subsystems and different functional domains are virtually connected to the information and communication technologies (ICT) and internet via sensors and devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), to collect and process real-time Big Data and make efficient, effective and sustainable solutions for a democratic and liveable city for its various stakeholders. This chapter explores the concepts and practices of sustainable smart cities across the globe and explores the use of technologies such as IoT, Blockchain technology and Cloud computing, etc. their challenges and then presents a view on business models for sustainable smart cities.

Income and wealth in Brazil is distributed as unequally and unjustly as in any other nation or region of the world. This chapter examines how wealth and income has been, is, or might be made available to the population. Using the conceptual framework of the substantive economics developed by Karl Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg, and their colleagues, the distribution of goods and services is analyzed as a socially “instituted process,” separate from production and other factors generally included in studies of economics. Four approaches are presented as they were elaborated in the thinking of authors who wrote at different times in history: The Infante Dom Pedro of Portugal in the early 15th century, Adam Smith in the late 18th century, Karl Marx in the 19th century, and Louis Kelso in the mid-20th century. Each approach, three of which have been, and one which might be instituted, is explored in terms of its potential for reducing poverty and correcting distributive injustice.

This chapter uses an intellectual capital (IC) qualitative approach for assessing the bio health technologies entrepreneurial ecosystem of a university located in Southern Europe, aiming to identify the role played by IC in fostering the sustainable success of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. There has been limited research dedicated to deepening the knowledge of the entrepreneurial ecosystems’ dimensions, using an IC lens, in the context of university cities with different dimensions. Small cities may not have some dimensions, so developed, comparing with the ones of the ecosystems of large urban centers. This chapter uses a qualitative approach funded in a case study exploring internal and external stakeholders of a Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystem, UBImedical, targeted at the bio health sector. The study is part of an exploratory study funded in the scope of a European Project, aiming to explore in a pioneering way the application of the dominant triad of capitals forming IC and, thus, identifying and understanding the dimensions of different entrepreneurial ecosystems. The case study reveals that the IC’s dimensions more critical for the success of the bio health entrepreneurial ecosystems are the structural capital and the relational capital, although human capital is perceived as a basic prerequisite for fostering the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s performance. The results are funded in primary and qualitative data collected from the interviews developed to previously identified external and internal stakeholders of this type of entrepreneurial ecosystem under study.

We argue that the stakeholder and CSR literature can benefit from more systematic thinking about ownership. We discuss general notions of ownership in the economics and legal literature and the entrepreneurial notion of ownership we have developed in prior work. On this basis, we argue that stakeholder theory needs to deal more systematically with ownership as an economic function that can be exercised with greater or lesser ability, may be complementary to other economic functions, and works better when assigned to homogeneous groups. Some stakeholder groups are likely to lack what we call “ownership competence,” even if they have made relationship-specific investments, in part because of a diversity of interests. We also discuss CSR from the perspective of ownership and support Friedman’s original position, but with a twist. The point of Friedman’s paper is not that firms “should” maximize profits, but that managerial pursuit of “socially responsible” activities in a discretionary way imposes costs on owners. We suggest this problem is exacerbated with entrepreneurial managers who can devise new ways to prop up their self-interested actions with new creative CSR initiatives.

The literature on non-traditional classroom environments claims that the changed emphasis in higher education teaching from the lecturer to students has intensified the global focus on student-centred learning, prompting colleges and universities globally to introspect, re-examine, and re-structure their pedagogical approaches in an attempt to align with national educational policies, and to position themselves favourably with potential students in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. This is an environment that now relies heavily on digital learning technologies, which has provoked scholars such as Heick (2012) to perceive the change to the virtual as one that makes higher education institutions accessible from anywhere – in the cloud, at home, in the workplace, or restaurant. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for this flexibility. These forces have put universities and colleges under pressure to implement new teaching approaches in non-traditional classroom settings that are appropriate for, and responsive to, the COVID-19 crisis and students in terms of learning and social support. This chapter identified and appraised key teaching approaches. It is evident that there are three key teaching approaches that higher education institutions have adopted for delivering learning in an emergency and in a student-centred fashion. The three approaches, which include the time and place dispersion, transactional distance, and collaborative learning approaches, embrace social support because they are grounded in social constructivism. Academics need to be fully committed to the role of social support giving – that is, emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support – in order to foster student wellbeing and cognitive development as students learn together but apart in non-traditional classrooms. The hurried manner in which teaching and learning practices in many higher education institutions have been moved to the online format has led academics to violate many key principles of the approaches they have adopted. And this situation is borne out in the case study discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. A review of current remote teaching and learning practices is required if academics are to embrace the full principles of the approaches that are appropriate for teaching and learning in non-traditional classroom contexts.

The second decade of the twenty-first century finds Brazil racked by a series of scandals that are extreme even by world standards. This chapter presents an explanation for one of the behaviors that have produced these scandals. Specifically, it is the offering of bribes to public officials by individuals or companies that stand to benefit from contracts to perform public services and, furthermore, the paying of kickbacks to the officials if the contract is awarded. I liken this behavior to the making of vows to the saints in the “popular” or “folk” form of Catholicism – and other popular religions that accept its basic premises – and the fulfillment of the promise if and when the otherworldly being provides what the petitioner requested. Part 1 of the chapter examines an election for mayor of the city of Fortaleza in 2012 in which the office was “bought” for what seemed to be an exorbitant amount of money. I hypothesize that this is to be explained by the anticipation of the city receiving government contracts to build a soccer stadium, a rail system, and other projects related to the 2014 World Cup. In Part 2, I examine Brazil’s religions beginning with popular Catholicism, to show that the normative way of gaining something desired from a supernatural – be it the restoration of health or the recovery of a lost item – is to offer it something it values and then fulfilling the promise if and when the petitioner receives what was requested. I contend that this important religious pattern continues to provide the template for the secular behavior that is being judged to be corrupt by standards other than those found in the religiously based worldview of many Brazilians.

The body of scholarship on YouTube is an expanding area of scholarly inquiry. Existent research indicates that music videos are one of the most salient features of YouTube. Interactionist research about popular music has provided important insights through interviews with fans and audience members; however, this work has yet to examine audience engagement with music videos on YouTube. Using Qualitative Media Analysis, I illustrate how the researcher of popular music can work with user comments collected from YouTube. Thematic understandings largely consistent with nostalgia that emerged from an analysis of user-generated comments in response to selected music videos on YouTube are explored. I conclude by suggesting some directions for future research.

This chapter applies science mapping analysis (SciMat) and literature review as research methods to examine literature about higher education institutions (HEIs) during the Covid-19 pandemic. User acceptance, satisfaction, and perception are identified as the most productive research themes in the sample of 561 Web of Science (WoS) indexed articles about HEIs during the pandemic. The literature review of the top themes reveals that user acceptance is influenced by the perceived usefulness of online learning and ease of using online tools. The level of satisfaction among students in online learning is relatively high and linked with the perceived benefits of online courses. Conditions influencing user acceptance and perceived satisfaction differ between students and lecturers. Technology-related themes appeared to be relatively under-researched as standalone themes, but technological aspects turned out to be important components of the most prolific research themes identified.