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The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison of two ways of developing and delivering massive open online courses (MOOCs). One was developed by The Open University in collaboration with FutureLearn; the other was developed independently by a small team at the Northampton University.

The different approaches had very different profiles of pedagogic flexibility, cost, development processes, institutional support and participant numbers.

MOOCs on existing large platforms can reach thousands of people, but constrain pedagogical choice. Self-made MOOCs have smaller audiences but can target them more effectively.

This comparison shows that, several years after MOOCs became prominent, there are many viable approaches for MOOCs.

The intricacies of electronic commerce via the Internet and World Wide Web have provided marketers with a host of interesting challenges. From using the Internet and World Wide Web sites as communication and promotional tools to performing distribution functions, marketers are finding an entirely new world of consumer purchasing behavior. Issues such as store layout, traffic patterns, and salesperson interactions within a retail store are vastly different in E‐Business marketing. As in a direct‐marketing exchange, trust becomes a central issue in the negotiation process. Winning the customers' trust, and keeping their trust, is essential to E‐Business.

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.

Online learning is developing rapidly in higher education. As a result, in the Initial Teacher Education Division at The University of Northampton, UK, academics have experimented with methods to embed blogs and online communities into courses to enhance learning for staff and students. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper critically analyses the approach used to examine media-rich multimodal content that was shared through these tools.

The paper models how blogs and communities have enhanced interdisciplinary subject teaching, staff development and student engagement. This is achieved by sharing case studies from the courses which model the strengths and limitations of practices adopted.

Focused discussion demonstrates how reflexivity, communities of practice and experimentation with technological teaching strategies fuel the learning that occurred.

This paper aims to set out to share the reflections of safeguarding adult board managers as they worked through what is likely to be just the first wave of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper draws on the experience of small number of safeguarding adult board managers who have provided reflections from practice.

This paper illustrates just some of the responses developed by safeguarding adult board managers and their boards to continue to deliver the work of safeguarding those at risk of abuse and harm in the face of unprecedented impact of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic on a key aspect of the safeguarding adult system in England.

The reflections reported here are not intended to offer a representative commentary on the experiences of those who oversee and manage safeguarding adults’ boards. It is intention to provide a flavour of some of the challenges and dilemmas faced and some of the creative solutions to address them used by one group of adult safeguarding practitioners.

This study aims to identify recent trends in the strategic repositioning of the human resources (HR) function within the hotel industry, and to explore challenges facing HR professionals as they engage in strategies to develop talent and organisational capability, while adjusting to the shifting boundaries of the HR function.

The study provides a case study investigation based on a qualitative research design. It draws on a series of informal discussions with key informants, in-depth round table discussions with members of the HR function and a rich source of secondary (company specific) data about a recent strategic change initiative.

The study presents a rich picture of the contradictory nature of the strategic repositioning of the HR function, and the role of electronic HR systems in shaping this. It points to the significance of “higher-order” HR capabilities associated with the functions’ capacity to engage in strategies to develop talent and organisational capability.

This study points to contradictions and tensions in shifting the focus of the HR function from “operational” to “strategic” management of talent. It offers four practice implications in the areas of continuous professional development, and building HR and line manager skills in dialogue, project management and the use of new technology, talent data and analytics.

This study illustrates the deployment of talent management practices within a broader organisational development remit to restructure the business and HR function in pursuit of more efficient and effective people management.

The purpose of this research is to explore the role of identity for consumers with disabilities in a retail context. Understanding disability identity is critical to ensuring inclusion in service environments. Despite the growing call to understand the role of identity in consumer services, research on disability identity and the impacts of identity on service inclusion remains minimal.

A qualitative methodology generated data through personal narratives from people with disabilities revealing deep insights into the complexity of identity in a fashion retail context.

Emergent themes detail five consumer disability identities – authentic unique self, integrated self, community self, expressive self and practical self – seen when viewing service experiences from the perspective of people with lived experience of disability. Individual and collective agency also emerged as key themes that enable people with disabilities to feel a sense of inclusion.

This research explores the service experiences of people with disabilities in a retail context through a disability identity lens. The authors contribute to service literature by identifying five consumer disability identities that people with a disability adopt through their service experience and present a typology that demonstrates how each identity impacts on agency, with implications for service inclusion.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of human resource (HR) role overload and HR role conflict on the HR function’s involvement in strategic decision making and to examine whether conditions of environmental dynamism moderate the impact of HR role conflict and HR role overload in that relationship.

The authors collected data from two sources, senior HR and top management team (TMT) executives. A total of 180 HR executives and 109 TMT members completed the survey. In all, 102 organisations were included in the sample with matched HR executive and TMT responses.

Results did not support hypothesised negative relationships between HR role management and involvement in strategic decision making but did establish the moderating effect of environmental dynamism, such that these associations were more negative at higher levels of dynamism.

The cross-sectional nature of the study precludes making inferences about causality and would need to be replicated with a longitudinal design before stronger inferences could be drawn with regard to the relationships between the variables. A strength of the study however is the use of two sources of data to address the issue of common method variance.

The research has implications for the potential value that HR provides in dynamic environments and the risk that HR role conflict and overload pose to the contribution that HR can make during these periods.

The research shifts the focus away from the definition of HR roles to considering how these roles are enacted and kept in balance.