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This paper describes a small research project undertaken in a technical college in Qatar on the use of iPads in the classroom. iPads were trialed for a semester each in mathematics and physics classes; students completed pre- and post-surveys. Classroom observations were carried out and interviews were conducted with both faculty (N=3) and students (N=19). Over 80% of students reported positively on the iPad as being “helpful” to “very helpful” for learning new things and course materials, for increasing their interaction with online course materials and getting course information and for exploring additional material related to course topics. Faculty perceptions of iPad use in class were also positive.

The construction industry’s daily processes demand heavy data usage and communication between project participants to meet client requirements. Thus, the application of information technology in project implementation has been increasing in the construction sector (CS) lately. However, the same cannot be seen in public sectors responsible for implementing government projects in South Africa. This study aimed to investigate the causes and effects of the underutilisation of information communication technology (ICT) in the building section of a public sector in a municipality in South Africa.

A qualitative approach was adopted for the study, using a public sector in one of the municipalities as a case study. Face-to-face interviews were conducted among the building unit workers, using unstructured interview questions. The data collected were analysed using the ATLAS.ti software.

The findings indicate a lack of understanding of existing and newly available ICT software and hardware technology among staff within the building technology due to lack of digitalisation in construction projects implementation, inadequate system upgrades, lack of adequate ICT resources, lack of financial resources for internet and software application subscriptions and lack of ICT training leading. The issues mentioned above have led to the outsourcing of projects professionals, slow pace of electronic emails, untrained professionals, usage of different and unlicensed software, resulting in the underutilisation of ICT within the whole building section. This change also adversely affects all officials, especially the junior officials who have graduated using the most recent ICT technology during their studies.

The building department of only one public sector was used for the study; therefore, the findings may not be generalisable. The case study public sector’s name is withheld for confidentiality purposes.

Adequate change management and continuous development, combined with the allocation of proper resources, would be necessary for all staff members. Enormous investments had to be made in the ICT equipment by providing a sufficient budget in the building section of the public sectors. The building section within public sectors should provide change management to all aged skills staff by attending seminars to learn new ICT technology applied within its work environment.

The study established the causes of the underutilisation of ICT in the CS, especially in the public work departments and municipalities, and how this contributes to service delivery.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which teaching staff cooperated with librarians in collection development, specifically in relation to electronic resources, and to identify barriers they encountered while performing collection development activities.

A mixed methods approach was adopted for the study. Quantitative and qualitative techniques of data collection and analysis were used to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the research topic. Data were gathered through a self-administered questionnaire and interviews. A total of 149 faculty members completed the questionnaire, yielding a response rate of 51.2%, while 16 library staff members were interviewed to obtain qualitative data.

The majority of the teaching staff who participated in the study affirmed that they had cooperated with subject librarians in collection development. A high percentage (62.4%) of the faculty members had collaborated with subject librarians in collection development activities. Only 37.6% of the faculty members had not participated in collection development activities with subject librarians to acquire library electronic resources. According to faculty members, some of the main challenges affecting collection development at the University of Namibia were a lack of catalogues for electronic resources and a lack of lists of titles from vendors. Moreover, librarians were not always available to assist faculty members. It is recommended that faculty members be part of the process of selecting materials and that a good relationship be fostered between librarians and faculty members to bring value to collection development activities.

Collection development in respect of electronic resources is a complex process to be undertaken by a single entity and, therefore, requires the collaboration of all stakeholders involved. In the case of institutions of higher learning, these stakeholders include faculty, librarians and vendors. The emergence of a variety of e-resources demands a meticulous strategy on the part of libraries to ensure they can offer a wide range of up-to-date and accurate resources that meet the evolving needs of their users. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, studies that are similar to this one have not been conducted in Namibia before. This case study presents useful findings and lessons on faculty–librarian cooperation for effective collection development, not only at the University of Namibia library but also at other academic libraries in economies with similar characteristics.

Throughout the world, healthcare policy has committed to delivering integrated models of care. The interface between primary–secondary care has been identified as a particularly challenging area in this regard. To that end, this study aimed to examine the issue of integrated care from general practitioners’ (GPs) perspectives in Ireland.

This multimethod study involved a cross-sectional survey and semi-structured interviews with GPs in the Ireland East region. A total of 1,274 GPs were identified from publicly available data as practising in the region, of whom the study team were able to identify 430 GPs with email addresses. An email invite was sent to 430 potential participants asking them to complete a 34-item online questionnaire and, for those who were willing, an in-depth interview was conducted with a member of the study team.

In total, 116 GPs completed the survey. Most GPs felt that enhancing integration between primary and secondary care in Ireland was a priority (n = 109, 93.9%). Five themes concerning the state of integrated care and initiatives to improve matters were identified from semi-structured interviews with 12 GPs.

The uniqueness of this study is that it uses a multimethod approach to provide insight into current GP views on the state of integrated care in Ireland, as well as their perspectives on how to improve integration within the Irish healthcare system.

Municipalities, as the front lines of service delivery, use websites as one of the tools to communicate information to the public. While it is considered a record, many organisations, including municipalities, do not manage websites as such. This study aims to explore the archiving of websites as records in the municipalities of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province in South Africa by using the web archiving life cycle model.

This study used a mixed-methods research with an explanatory design, with quantitative data collected first through content analysis of websites and qualitative data collected through interviews. Researchers used multilevel sampling, first quantitatively analysing all available websites of the municipalities (52) in KZN, and then qualitatively selecting only records managers, information managers, web administrators, communication managers and website managers or designers from municipalities because of their understanding and involvement with websites in some way.

This study established that some records on municipal websites are often in paper format in record-keeping systems, whereas others are born digital and are not captured in the systems. Municipalities lack a dedicated web online harvesting tool as well as an archiving policy or strategy to guide website archiving. Furthermore, municipalities placed a high reliance on service providers to keep their websites operational.

It became clear during the interviews that most of the participants were unfamiliar with web archiving. As a result, only 12 of the 56 selected participants from the municipalities provided the required information in relation to the current study as others could not provide answers. Data for other participants were not analysed.

Due to a lack of infrastructure for ingesting digital records into archival custody, a framework for harvesting web content of value is proposed both internally in municipalities and externally to an archive repository.

Whilst English remains the language of global commerce, the role and outcomes of English language provision in English-medium higher education institutions in the Arab Gulf countries remains central to any discussion on graduate profile and the employability of graduates in the global marketplace. This paper describes the findings of research into English workplace communication skills amongst a sample of Bahrain employers and students at Bahrain Polytechnic. Using a mixed methods approach, data was gathered through telephone interviews, student workplace simulations and employer focus groups. Findings show that generic employability skills, channelled through English as a second or additional language, are highly valued by Bahrain’s employers. In particular, students need to market themselves as confident, knowledgeable individuals during the recruitment process and after recruitment, continuing to operate successfully in the sociolinguistic culture of their company. Consequently, it is concluded that English language training in higher education programmes needs to move from purely linguistic and degree-related content areas to a broader remit of English for communication purposes that covers both specialised discourse fields and broader generic employability skills and competencies.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the leadership behaviors of managers of virtual teams (VTs), particularly in the areas of trust building and conflict management. This study aims to expand the research of VT performance by offering first-person accounts from VT leaders on the strategies implemented to drive VT performance.

This study used a grounded theory approach to examine the leadership behaviors through in-depth interviews with eight field managers of VTs employed by different technology companies. Interview questions focused on trust-building and conflict management techniques. This structured qualitative study incorporates elements of narrative inquiry interwoven in the findings.

Building a high-trust environment was found to be critical to VT performance. VT managers indicated that effective conflict resolution skills were also important.

Although the sample size is within the suggested range for a valid phenomenological study, the results may lack generalizability. Participants were limited to the technology industry; leaders of high-performing VTs in other industries could offer differing results.

This study’s contribution is the exploration and identification of innovative techniques that VT managers implemented to build trust and resolve conflict. A lack of holistic training programs for the VT leader is also considered along with suggestions for future research and implications for the VT managers.

This study’s contribution is the exploration and identification of innovative techniques that VT managers implemented that drive VT performance, particularly related to building high levels of trust and managing conflict effectively. Practices are suggested whereby both the VT leader and the organization take an active role in ensuring that the VT has the opportunity to perform optimally.

Technology increasingly features in intimate relationships and is used by domestic violence perpetrators to enact harm. In this chapter, we propose a theoretical and practical framework for technology-facilitated harms in heterosexual relationships which we characterize as digital coercive control. Here, we include behaviors which can be classified as abuse and stalking and also individualized tactics which are less easy to categorize, but evoke fear and restrict the freedoms of a particular woman. Drawing on their knowledge of a victim/survivor's experiences and, in the context of patterns and dynamics of abuse, digital coercive control strategies are personalized by perpetrators and extend and exacerbate “real-world” violence.

Digital coercive control is unique because of its spacelessness and the ease, speed, and identity-shielding which technology affords. Victim/survivors describe how perpetrator use of technology creates a sense of omnipresence and omnipotence which can deter women from exiting violent relationships and weakens the (already tenuous) notion that abuse can be “escaped.” We contend that the ways that digital coercive control shifts temporal and geographic boundaries warrant attention. However, spatiality more broadly cannot be overlooked. The place and shape in which victim/survivors and perpetrators reside will shape both experiences of and response to violence. In this chapter, we explore these ideas, reporting on findings from a study on digital coercive control in regional, rural, and remote Australia. We adopt a feminist research methodology in regard to our ethos, research processes, analysis, and the outputs and outcomes of our project. Women's voices are foreground in this approach and the emphasis is on how research can be used to inform, guide, and develop responses to domestic violence.

The purpose of the article is to assess the effectiveness, compliance, adoption and lessons learnt from the pilot implementation of a data integration solution between an acute care hospital information system (HIS) and a long-term care (LTC) home electronic medical record through a case report.

Utilization statistics of the data integration solution were captured at one-month post implementation and again one year later for both the emergency department (ED) and LTC home. Clinician feedback from surveys and structured interviews was obtained from ED physicians and a multidisciplinary LTC group.

The authors successfully exchanged health information between a HIS and the electronic medical record (EMR) of an LTC facility in Canada. Perceived time savings were acknowledged by ED physicians, and actual time savings as high as 45 min were reported by LTC staff when completing medication reconciliation. Barriers to adoption included awareness, training efficacy and delivery models, workflow integration within existing practice and the limited number of facilities participating in the pilot. Future direction includes broader staff involvement, expanding the number of sites and re-evaluating impacts.

A data integration solution to exchange clinical information can make patient transfers more efficient, reduce data transcription errors, and improve the visibility of essential patient information across the continuum of care.

Although there has been a large effort to integrate health data across care levels in the United States and internationally, the groundwork for such integrations between interoperable systems has only just begun in Canada. The implementation of the integration between an enterprise LTC electronic medical record system and an HIS described herein is the first of its kind in Canada. Benefits and lessons learnt from this pilot will be useful for further hospital-to-LTC home interoperability work.

The objective of the study was to explore which COVID-19 teaching and learning methods, that enhanced accounting students' learning experience, should be applied at a residential university after the pandemic.

A qualitative exploratory approach within an interpretive paradigm was applied. A total of 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with accounting students and the data were analysed using thematic analysis.

This study shows how pre-COVID-19 accounting education can be adapted by learning from the teaching and learning experiences gained during the pandemic and that there are various teaching and learning methods that can be applied in the post-COVID-19 period to enhance students' learning experience. These blended active teaching and learning methods include: the flipped classroom, discussion forum, electronic platform (to ask questions during class), key-concept videos and summary videos. Introducing these teaching and learning methods comes with challenges and the study provides recommendations on how to overcome foreseen obstacles. The contribution of the research is that it informs accounting lecturers' decision-making regarding which teaching and learning methods to apply in the aftermath of COVID-19 to enhance students' learning experience.

It is uncertain which teaching and learning methods employed during the COVID-19 pandemic should be applied at a residential university to enhance the teaching and learning experience after the pandemic. Accounting lecturers might return to their pre-COVID-19 modus operandi, and the valuable experience gained during the pandemic will have served no purpose.