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The purpose of this paper is to gain more insight into employees' on‐the‐job learning. Its specific purpose is to develop and validate a classification of on‐the‐job learning activities and learning themes, focusing on the nursing profession in particular.

Two successive studies were conducted for this purpose. In the first study in‐depth interviews with 20 Dutch nurses were analysed using a grounded theory approach. The content validity of the categories found in the first study was investigated in the second study by interviewing 17 supervisors and eight educators from different hospitals in The Netherlands.

The paper finds that the main categories of learning activities are: learning by doing one's regular job, learning by applying something new in the job, learning by social interaction with colleagues, learning by theory or supervision, and learning by reflection. First‐order learning activities and second‐order learning activities can be distinguished. The main categories of on‐the‐job learning themes are: the technical‐practical domain, the socio‐emotional domain, the organisational domain, the developmental domain, and a pro‐active attitude to work.

The validation study was conducted by the same researchers as the first study. The findings are based on one profession (nursing) in one country (The Netherlands).

The categories can be used by nurse educators and health sector managers/trainers to develop comprehensive and structured intervention methods for the improvement of on‐the‐job learning which do justice to the complexity and diversity of on‐the‐job learning by nurses. HR (development) professionals can use the classification as part of a competence management and development system.

The study provides a detailed, complete and multi‐dimensional explication of nurses' on‐the‐job learning activities and learning themes, grounding the classification and framework in empirical data and using multiple data sources.

Design-thinking (DT) in education has attracted significant interest from practitioners and academics, as it proffers new-age thinking to transform learning processes. This paper synthesises extant literature and identifies the current intellectual frontiers.

First, a systematic-literature-review was undertaken employing a robust process of selecting papers (from 1986 to 2022) by reading titles, abstracts and keywords based on a required criterion, backward–forward chaining and strict quality evaluations. Next, a bibliometric analysis was undertaken using VOSviewer. Finally, text analysis using RStudio was done to trace the implications of past work and future directions.

At first, we identify and explain 12 clusters through bibliometric coupling that include “interdisciplinary-area”, “futuristic-learning”, “design-process” and “design-education”, amongst others. We explain each of these clusters later in the text. Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM), management education, design and change, teacher training, entrepreneurship education and technology, digital learning, gifted education and course development) Secondly, through co-word-analysis, we identify and explain four additional clusters that include “business education and pedagogy”, “content and learning environment”, “participants and outcome” and finally, “thinking-processes”. Based on this finding, we believe that the future holds a very positive presence sentiment for design thinking and education (DT&E) in changing the 21st century learning.

For investigating many contemporary challenges related to DT&E, like virtual reality experiential learning, sustainability education, organisational learning and management training, etc. have been outlined.

Academics may come up with new or improved courses for the implementation of DT in educational settings and policymakers may inculcate design labs in the curricula to fortify academic excellence. Managers who would employ DT in their training, development and policy design, amongst others, could end up gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

This study conducted a comprehensive review of the field, which to our limited knowledge, no prior studies have been done so far. Besides, the study also outlines interesting research questions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to review published research to discern the trends in instructional practices and interventions that educators employ to augment simulation based learning in business education.

Qualitative research was conducted using a systematic review of scholarly articles that satisfied inclusion criteria, such as the study reported on a business simulation, discussed educator interventions and instructional practices, was focused on higher education or training, discusses a computer-based simulation and was published between 2007 and 2017.

Overarching themes evident within the data included: didactic interventions, preparation activities, prompting student reflection, coaching and mentoring, providing feedback, structuring teams, assessments, encouraging collaborative learning and fostering student engagement.

Although there are many systematic reviews of simulation-based learning literature, specifically within the fields of medicine and nursing, most focus on summarising the evidence that simulations are an effective tool to enable learning. To the best of knowledge, there has not been a systematic analysis of the instructional approaches or educational interventions that educators’ choose to include in the structured design of simulation-based courses in business education. This study begins to address the issue of how educators and technology synergistically aim to deliver valuable student learning opportunities.

The importance of food education in primary schools has been globally recognised. However, more detailed definitions of its learning objectives are rarely found. The study aimed to define multisectoral themes and learning objectives for food education in primary education in Finland.

A descriptive three-round Delphi study was conducted with experts in food education in various organisations. In the first questionnaire, the participants were asked to define possible objectives for food education related to general objectives for basic education. Respondents of the first questionnaire formed a research panel (n = 22). These panellists were then invited to complete the second (n = 16) and third questionnaires (n = 12), where the objectives were further modified. Qualitative content analysis and Bloom's taxonomy were applied in the process of creating the learning objectives.

In the iterative process, 42 learning objectives for food education in primary schools were defined. Further, “Sustainability and ethics of food systems” was defined as the cross-cutting theme of food education. In addition, 13 subthemes were defined, which fell into three thematic categories: personal (e.g. feelings), practical (e.g. eating) and intangible (e.g. culture) issues.

The defined learning objectives for a holistic food education may be used in advancing primary school curriculum in Finland and perhaps other countries.

The emergence of social media has provided an alternative mechanism for students to provide and access online reviews about universities. These forms of feedback are often not systematically monitored and interpreted by universities. The purpose of this paper is to analyse quantitative ratings and qualitative comments provided by students via Google reviews of 40 Australian universities. The qualitative comments were analysed via thematic coding which identified four key themes including quality of teaching, course design, learning environment and administrative support. The data were also subjected to automated content analysis using the text analytics software Leximancer to enhance the objectivity and reliability of findings.

The study involved the extraction of quantitative ratings as well as qualitative comments from Google reviews of 40 Australian universities. Each university was searched on Google and their rating and comments were collected as of August 2019. The qualitative data were included in an Excel spreadsheet along with the name of the universities, and their quantitative ratings. Using thematic coding techniques, the qualitative data were manually coded into four themes: quality of teaching, course design, learning environment and administrative support. Furthermore, the qualitative comments were grouped into two categories: positive comments and negative comments.

The paper argues the need for universities to actively monitor these new forms of student feedback which have provided autonomy and freedom for students and other stakeholders to access and provide 24/7 feedback. The study found common themes emerging from the positive and negative student comments related to: quality of teaching, course design, learning environments and administrative support. These aspects contributed to the students’ satisfaction levels when they reflected on their educational experience on Google reviews. The study also found that institutions with high numbers of negative comments tend to have lower ratings compared to those with positive comments.

The study did not use other learning analytic tools to measure and assess the feedback from students using social media and other forms of feedback.

Many studies have been undertaken on student experience. Studies have focussed on the experience of home and international students, on-campus and online students, and students from various underrepresented backgrounds. So far no study has been undertaken on the reviews provided by students using Google reviews.

The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory analysis of the blog sites built by older adults and public libraries in Taiwan in order to explore what improvements public library blogs can make to support self‐learning for older adults.

This study was conducted in three stages: location of blogs built by older adults that meet the search criteria; location of blogs built by public libraries in Taiwan; and examination of data related to the blog posts by adopting a content analysis methodology.

The content of blogs built by older adults is categorised into eight major themes, i.e. spiritual growth and religion, health and medicine, leisure activities, learning, food, politics, investment, and selling. Blogs built by public libraries concentrate on four dimensions, i.e. news or announcements, library instruction materials, learning information or materials, and book clubs. Only a few blogs support self‐learning by supplying learning materials and/or initiating learning activities.

This study has two limitations: there are cut‐off dates for the target content (31 January 2010 for blogs built by older adults and 28 February 2010 for blogs built by public libraries in Taiwan); and it is possible that some of the blogs targeted were not detected and identified.

The paper is useful as an introduction for public libraries to build or redesign their blogs, so that they can support self‐learning for senior citizens.

This study represents a timely analysis of rapidly growing blogs built by older adults and public libraries and makes an original contribution by identifying what has not been discussed in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the ways in which postgraduate study in vocational fields supports the development of advanced competences amongst mid‐career professionals.

The extensive written communications between health and safety professionals taking a postgraduate course in health and safety management and their tutor were investigated to determine the competence domains where learning was taking place or attempted. The individual written communications were analysed and each issue raised allocated to a learning area. The quantitative results for each area were determined. The learning areas were assigned to one or more competence development domains.

The quantified results demonstrate that the main domain where mid‐career professionals on this postgraduate course were most strongly challenged to learn and develop in advanced competences was the meta‐competence domain on the Cheetham and Chivers model.

This study was based on written communications passing between a limited number of students and one tutor on a single postgraduate study programme. There is clearly great scope to extend this form of research given the large number of postgraduate vocational study programmes now undertaken by mid‐career professionals.

Tutors need to focus strongly on supporting the very demanding learning leading to the growth of meta‐competencies. Given the ready availability of relevant factual information to mid‐career professionals in the information age, there is much less need to focus on teaching facts, although supporting the interpretation and application of such factual information by students retains great importance.

Few other studies exist which attempt to analyse written communications between tutors and postgraduate students on professional/vocational courses in terms of how such courses are developing professional competences.

In an empirical study learning opportunities were identified. Learning opportunities are enablers or disablers for the achievement of shared understanding.

Actors were interviewed about their communication process. The learning history method was used to analyze and structure the data. From the learning histories learning opportunities were derived. Finally, the learning opportunities were categorized.

Learning opportunities were found on three levels: the actor, project and company level. They were also joined in six themes. Combining these two patterns showed that learning opportunities are interrelated.

The case study done was retrospective for the actors involved. Therefore, only conclusions could be drawn on the achievement of shared understanding. To be able to say more about the creation of shared understanding, following a NPD project real time would be desirable, in future research.

This study shows the importance for managers of looking across boundaries. Only solving problems integrally within the organization will help to solve problems successfully. Knowing the learning opportunities of a NPD project finished, will help them to improve future projects. The explicit use of storytelling during a NPD project may help to create a learning organization with shared understanding between the actors.

Previous research showed, shared understanding is important, to be able to manage the integration of different knowledge domains. However, these studies do not describe learning opportunities for the achievement of shared understanding, which was done in this study.

Supporting students transitioning from high school into college continues to be a challenge for academics and policy-makers. Composition assignments that include Kuh’s (2008) High Impact Practices (HIP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) rubric and HIP tenets of Civic Learning and Community Engagement (Fig. 1), help foster opportunities for empathy, which develops students’ abilities to think critically, write well, and succeed in college and beyond. While effective college teaching and instruction are necessary, increasing enrollments, and increasing percentages of First-Year Composition (FYC) students requiring supportive composition courses compound the difficulties of the effort. According to AAC&U, “a global community requires a more informed, engaged, and socially responsible citizenry” (2009, p. 1; Finley & McNair, 2013). In other words, educators and employers believe that “personal and social responsibility should be core elements of a 21^st-century education” (AAC&U, 2009, p. 1). This conceptual content analysis study framed by HIP analyzed 10 FYC syllabi from different composition faculty at one urban Hispanic public four-year university (SMU) in Southern California during the 2015–2016 academic year in the context of the university’s mission statement embracing Civic Learning and Community Engagement for FYC students.

The scientific community shares a heritage of knowledge generated by several different fields of research. Identifying how scientific interest evolves is relevant for recording and understanding research trends and society’s demands.

This article presents SciBR-M, a novel method to identify scientific interest evolution from bibliographic material based on Formal Concept Analysis. The SciBR-M aims to describe the thematic evolution surrounding a field of research. The method begins by hierarchically organising sub-domains within the field of study to identify the themes that are more relevant. After this organisation, we apply a temporal analysis that extracts implication rules with minimal premises and a single conclusion, which are helpful to observe the evolution of scientific interest in a specific field of study. To analyse the results, we consider support, confidence, and lift metrics to evaluate the extracted implications.

The authors applied the SciBR-M method for the Educational Data Mining (EDM) field considering 23 years since the first publications. In the digital libraries context, SciBR-M allows the integration of the academy, education, and cultural memory, in relation to a study domain.

Cultural changes lead to the production of new knowledge and to the evolution of scientific interest. This knowledge is part of the scientific heritage of society and should be transmitted in a structured and organised form to future generations of scientists and the general public.

The method, based on Formal Concept Analysis, identifies the evolution of scientific interest to a field of study. SciBR-M hierarchically organises bibliographic material to different time periods and explores this hierarchy from proper implication rules. These rules permit identifying recurring themes, i.e. themes subset that received more attention from the scientific community during a specific period. Analysing these rules, it is possible to identify the temporal evolution of scientific interest in the field of study. This evolution is observed by the emergence, increase or decrease of interest in topics in the domain. The SciBR-M method can be used to register and analyse the scientific, cultural heritage of a field of study. In addition, the authors can use the method to stimulate the process of creating knowledge and innovation and encouraging the emergence of new research.