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The author redesigned a course titled “Applied Information Technology: Networking” and applied online collaborative learning (CL) with initiation and self‐regulated learning (SRL) to improve students’ involvement in this course in an environment that is full of free online games, shopping websites, and social networking websites. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential effects of online CL with initiation and SRL on students’ involvement.

This study designed an intervention of online CL with initiation and SRL to improve students’ involvement and their learning in a blended course. It is believed that this article is important to the computing field and could provide insight for teachers to design their online courses and teaching methods.

The author in this study adopted SRL in the implementation of online CL with initiation, and explored their effects on improving students’ involvement. The results of this empirical study report that the effects of online CL with initiation and SRL were positive, and led to the best involvement in the blended course among the three classes.

The effects of online CL with initiation and SRL in this study were positive; however, problems of experimental validity may result from students in the comparison group being incidentally exposed to the treatment condition, having more enthusiastic teaching, being more motivated than students in the control group, etc. (Gribbons and Herman). Besides, some other contextual factors and individual behaviours might influence students’ online learning effects. For example, students’ adaptability to the online learning environments and their readiness for self‐directed learning may result in the differences of the effects among the three groups (Shen, Lee and Tsai).

The internet has enabled a shift from contiguous learning groups to asynchronous distributed learning groups utilizing computer‐supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments (Kreijns, Kirschner and Jochems). It is expected that the interventions of online teaching methods, course design, and learning activities in this study may provide a reference for teachers, particularly for blended learning computing courses.

The results of this study report that the effects of online CL with initiation and SRL were positive, and contributed to the best involvement in the blended course among the three classes. The author further discusses the implications for schools and teachers who plan to provide online or blended learning for their students.

First, this study provides a scenario about how to help students collaborate and learn regularly, and improve their involvement in a blended course through online CL and SRL, particularly for computing courses. Second, this study specifies how teachers can provide initiation to help students climb the learning curve and overcome the bottlenecks typically encountered in the implementation of online CL. Third, this study is one of the first attempts to explore and demonstrate the effects of online CL with initiation and SRL in a blended course simultaneously.

A brand community consists of relationships between a brand and consumers; community members’ identification with the brand community is a central characteristic of the community. This study aims to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate how and why such identification-based relationships yield firm- and member-level benefits to participants in the brand community.

This cross-sectional study analyzes data collected through a questionnaire survey of members from the brand community of VW-Golf Club members in Taiwan. The researchers attended the annual meeting of club members and handed out questionnaires directly to the members. The degree centrality of each member was calculated using UCINET 6 for Windows, a social network analysis software application. This study adopts the partial least squares program to evaluate the measurement properties and structural relationships specified in the research model.

The findings suggest that when customers’ identification with a brand community becomes salient, they strengthen their emotional attachment to the brand and improve their centrality in the network. Consequently, emotional attachment can serve as a guiding principle in decision-making and thus strengthen brand equity and assessment of brand extensions. Central members will also gain greater benefits, including collaborative opportunities and influence, through their advantageous position in the network.

This study makes four main contributions to the brand community literature. First, this is the first empirical study to simultaneously examine the relationships among community identification (customer to community), emotional attachment to the brand (customer to brand) and network centrality (customer to customer). Second, the empirical framework depicts dual value-creation routes that explain how identification-based relationships can yield firm- and member-level benefits. With respect to firm-level benefits, this is the first empirical study to examine the brand equity and assessment of brand extension in the brand community research. Third, this study applies the rarely adopted UCINET 6 software to scrutinize the network data from the brand community. Finally, this paper examines three actions that organizations can leverage to enhance consumer identification with a brand community.

The paper aims to examine how trust interacts with factors affecting interorganizational knowledge sharing in green supply chains, where cooperation and competition coexist.

A new research model is developed which comprises nine constructs and 13 research hypotheses, with trust as a mediating construct. The nine constructs are measured by well‐supported measures in the literature. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 288 major green manufacturing firms in Taiwan, using structural equation modeling.

The paper finds that trust is the pivot of the factors influencing interorganizational knowledge sharing. The more a factor contributes to trust positively (such as participation and communication) or negatively (such as opportunistic behavior), the more the factor contributes to knowledge sharing correspondingly. The factors with no significant influence on trust (such as shared values and learning capacity) have no or less influence on knowledge sharing.

The empirical study is conducted on green supply chains, with data collected from Taiwan's green manufacturing firms. With the research model developed, cross‐industrial studies on various forms of supply chains can be conducted to investigate whether differences between supply chains exist about the role that trust plays in interorganizational knowledge sharing.

The findings of the paper provide useful insights into how supply chain members should reinforce their collaborative behaviors and activities that would enhance the trust‐based relationships, in order to achieve the competitive advantage of knowledge sharing for the supply chain as a whole.

The new research model developed allows the relationships between trust and other influencing factors on interorganizational knowledge sharing to be explored. The model reflects the coexistence of the cooperation and competition relationships between supply chain members, which is not dealt with in previous studies.

Glass is a promising interposer substrate for 2.5 D integration; yet detailed analysis of the interfacial reliability of through-glass vias (TGVs) has been lacking. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the design and material factors responsible for the interfacial delamination in TGVs and identify methods to improve reliability.

The interfacial reliability of TGVs is studied both analytically and numerically. An analytical solution is presented to show the dependence of the energy release rate (ERR) for interfacial delamination on the via design and the thermal mismatch strain. Then, finite element analysis (FEA) is used to investigate the influence of detailed design and material factors, including the pitch distance, via aspect ratio, via geometry and the glass and via materials, on the susceptibility to interfacial delamination.

ERR for interfacial delamination is directly proportional to the via diameter and the thermal mismatch strain. Thinner wafers with smaller aspect ratios show larger ERRs. Changing the via geometry from a fully filled via to an annular via leads to lower ERR. FEA results also show that certain material combinations have lower thermal mismatch strains, thus less prone to delamination.

The results and approach presented in this paper can guide the design and development of more reliable 2.5 D glass interposers.

This paper represents the first attempt to comprehensively evaluate the impact of design and material selection on the interfacial reliability of TGVs.