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This study empirically analyse the lived and individual experiences of internet use time among postgraduate students in a period where the line between the virtual and real is blurred. The infusion of the internet in higher education has not only facilitated the production of new knowledge but has also led to reports of internet addiction among many users during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns. This study aims to evaluate the level of internet addiction among postgraduate students and the supportive information services role that librarians could provide.

In this study, 279 postgraduate students completed a quantitative survey targeted at all the postgraduate students at a university campus in South Africa. Data was collected using an adopted internet addiction test questionnaire. The data was descriptively and inferentially analysed.

As many as 61 (22.7%) are always online, with most of the respondents, 112 (41.6%) spend 10 h or more on the internet daily. Laptop computers at 44.7% emerged as the primary electronic device used by postgraduate students for accessing the internet, surpassing the prevalence of mobile phone usage. On internet addiction level, internet use time had a statistically significant relation with problematic internet use levels in respondents. These results suggest that the increased uncontrolled internet use could negatively interfere with productive academic work of postgraduate students. However, based on the inferential statistical results, it can be concluded that academic use of the internet does not contribute to increased levels of internet addiction. The study recommends that librarians should provide literacy education and resources on how to use the internet safely and responsibly, including tips on setting boundaries, managing time online and productively using online information resources.

The study assesses problematic internet use among postgraduate students and provides suggestions on supportive information services that librarians could provide in an era where many library information services provision and higher education are hinged on the internet.

Drawing on social identity theory (SIT), the current research highlights the sequential mediation effects of customer interaction, functional value and hedonic value in linking customer-brand identification and self-representation with online brand advocacy (OBA).

Data were gathered from 483 Egyptian and 595 non-Egyptian Aliexpress shopping platform customers, then analyzed using SmartPLS 4.

The multigroup analysis findings revealed that customer interaction and functional/hedonic values sequentially mediated the linkages of customer-brand identification and self-presentation with OBA for Egyptian and non-Egyptian user groups.

The novelty of this study is that it tested and validated customer interaction with the Aliexpress service scale, allowing for reflection on the interactive nature of this platform between Egyptian and non-Egyptian customers. SIT also lends credence to the idea that self-presentation mediates the effect of customer-brand identification on Aliexpress’s OBA, potentially shedding new light on this understudied dimension using a theoretical framework.

Given declining tuition funds and government grants, Kenyan universities need to develop strategies, including increased research grants and collaborations, to diversify their income sources. Well-managed doctoral students can boost a university’s teaching and research outputs. However, numbers of students enrolled in doctoral programmes at Kenyan universities are low, and graduation rates and time-to-graduate statistics are disturbing. Research undertaken elsewhere underline the important role played by supervisors and peers in facilitating students’ sense of belonging and their success. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of supervisory and peer support on PhD students’ sense of belonging and their success at Kenyan universities.

In this cross-sectional study, data were gathered through an online questionnaire from 614 students admitted to doctoral programmes at Kenyan universities between 2010 and 2018. We used multi-item scales to collect data on PhD students’ self-efficacy, supervisory and peer support and a sense of belonging.

Structural equation modelling results revealed that PhD students’ modes of study and self-efficacy were significantly associated with the quality of supervision, peer support and a sense of belonging. However, only age, a sense of belonging and the quality of supervision were directly linked to their success.

This study contributes to the literature on doctoral-level education, responding to the need for research on the influence of relationships with supervisors and peers on PhD students’ sense of belonging and their success, especially in developing countries.

The study aims to investigate the utilisation of open research data repositories (RDRs) for storing and sharing research data in higher learning institutions (HLIs) in Tanzania.

A survey research design was employed to collect data from postgraduate students at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha, Tanzania. The data were collected and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. A census sampling technique was employed to select the sample size for this study. The quantitative data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), whilst the qualitative data were analysed thematically.

Less than half of the respondents were aware of and were using open RDRs, including Zenodo, DataVerse, Dryad, OMERO, GitHub and Mendeley data repositories. More than half of the respondents were not willing to share research data and cited a lack of ownership after storing their research data in most of the open RDRs and data security. HILs need to conduct training on using trusted repositories and motivate postgraduate students to utilise open repositories (ORs). The challenges for underutilisation of open RDRs were a lack of policies governing the storage and sharing of research data and grant constraints.

Research data storage and sharing are of great interest to researchers in HILs to inform them to implement open RDRs to support these researchers. Open RDRs increase visibility within HILs and reduce research data loss, and research works will be cited and used publicly. This paper identifies the potential for additional studies focussed on this area.

This chapter discusses the process of initiating and developing an open and ongoing conversation about values within a doctoral community in an education research center located within a British university. To do this, the authors first articulate the local and institutional context of this specific doctoral community and the intersections of values declared by the host institution and the specific research center.

This chapter then moves on to describing the process of building an open conversation with postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and staff supporting them. This open conversation questions and explores the institutionally stated values, starting from collaboratively negotiated guiding questions and prompts. The discussion of responses to those prompts, obtained through an anonymous online platform, grounds then a discussion of how values can become relevant and rooted in everyday experience for PGRs. The authors, as a collective, use the concept of “boundaries,” emerged in the conversations themselves but also relevant in academic literature, as a linking concept for the discussion of the responses.

The discussion then concludes by articulating the broader impact of the engagement in these conversations about values within and beyond the boundaries of the host institution and argues for the importance of such ongoing conversations as fundamental elements of fostering value-based communities and cultures in higher education contexts.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the needs of lecturers and learners for digital scholarship services (DSS) and to suggest recommendations for the development of DSS at Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM).

The research employed a mixed method approach, comprising a paper questionnaire with 360 respondents to collect quantitative data and in-depth interviews with 18 participants, including lecturers (L), postgraduate students (P), and undergraduate students (U), to gather qualitative data.

The findings indicate that lecturers and students have diverse needs for various DSS services, with digital information resources and institutional repositories being the most common, followed by new and workable digital technology infrastructure, training courses in using digital tools and methods, and ongoing advice and support at different stages of the research process.

The limitations of this study indicate that further research is necessary to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the DSS needs in higher education institutions in Vietnam of various sizes and characteristics.

This research provides a practical basis for the development and provision of appropriate support to the development of DSS at VNU-HCM.

The originality of this paper and its value lies in the contribution to the understanding of the needs of DSS in a context of the digital transformation and the improvement of the quality of education and research in the higher education sector in Vietnam.

The purpose of this study is to examine postgraduate students' reflexive narratives about their entrepreneurial passion (EP) experience as a result of their direct participation in a series of hand-selected experiential learning events within the curated identity workspace (IW) of a cross-disciplinary postgraduate entrepreneurship education programme.

This study uses a qualitative exploratory design using interpretative phenomenological analysis with a group of graduate students from a cross-disciplinary postgraduate entrepreneurship education program at an entrepreneurial university.

This study discovers that students’ EP experience is developed through the internalisation of an entrepreneurship learning activity into their personal identity through the harmonisation and reorganisation of their competing micro-identities of professional and entrepreneurial identity, prompting them to create a new identity that enables them to act entrepreneurially without relinquishing their existing professional identity.

This study demonstrates how entrepreneurial education programmes function as an IW and posits a theoretical model illustrating the hidden connections between entrepreneurial activity, personal identity and entrepreneurial learning experience that collectively influence individuals' entrepreneurial behaviour.

This paper aims to explore how researchers in general, and field researchers in particular, might respond to systems of governance of the researchers' activity in ways that can support rather than distort the quality of the research.

We draw upon literature on serendipity to develop a framework for engaging with the positive and negative potentials of systems of governance. We ground our analysis in discussion of participation in the field comprising two parts: first, the examination of our own activities and second, the accounts of participation found in two career-autobiographical interviews with emeritus professors of management accounting from Japan.

We highlight the potential for a productive tension between two contrasting perspectives that researchers might take on governance of their activity. A contractual perspective sees the value of targets and detailed pre-planning. A reflexive perspective sees the value of exploring the unexpected and considering many alternatives. We offer a framework for considering serendipity and the conditions that facilitate serendipity to help researchers maintain a productive tension between these perspectives.

We build upon retrospective accounts of two successful individuals whose careers evolved in a specific context. The intention is not to set out what might be generally achievable in a research career, nor to propose specific lines of action or planning in relation to specific systems of governance, since these vary across countries and over time. Rather, the paper draws on these materials to illuminate the more general challenge of preparing for serendipity in a way that goes beyond simple opportunism.

We analyse how researchers' mindfulness of serendipity and the nature of contexts that facilitate serendipity can encourage a productive tension between contractual and reflexive perspectives on governance of academic activity.

This research aims to determine the levels of education quality (EQ), technology usage (TU), students' satisfaction (SS) and the impact of EQ on SS. Also, it seeks to find out how TU as a moderator affects EQ and SS in Pakistani private higher education institutions (HEIs).

A total of 440 postgraduate students at eleven private universities in Lahore, Punjab Province, Pakistan, participated in empirical research and data were obtained through the use of an online questionnaire. Simple random sampling was used to choose participants and partial least square structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data.

The findings revealed that Pakistani private HEIs have a medium level of EQ, TU and SS. Furthermore, the data reveal the existence of a significant positive relationship between EQ and SS, whereas TU as a moderator was found to negatively affect EQ and SS.

Postgraduate students of private HEIs in Pakistan were considered for this investigation and this study was limited to testing only in Punjab province. Another limitation of this study is that it was based on a research framework from previous research and literature. This study employed questionnaire surveys to conduct evaluations of teachers' teaching quality by university students. Furthermore, the questionnaire employed student self-evaluations to assess the quality of teaching. The research data would be more detailed if it were possible to include teachers' self-evaluations of their teaching quality.

The current study provides key insights for policymakers, higher education commission and HEIs. The results suggest leveraging the identified medium levels of EQ, TU and student satisfaction in Pakistani private HEIs. In an effort to boost the medium levels, policymakers are encouraged to enhance the teaching and learning experience by robustly integrating Web 4.0 technologies. Institutions can intervene strategically by investing in infrastructure and innovative tools aligned with students' technological needs. Likewise, policymakers and institutions can optimize learning management systems (LMS) by developing and implementing policies that encourage their adoption and optimization across HEIs. This may contribute to the accomplishment of the United Nations' sustainable development goal of providing quality education. Moreover, with the help of this research HEIs can establish minimum quality standards regarding academic teaching and learning materials. Implementing the above-mentioned practical implications might boost student satisfaction in HEIs which would benefit not only students but also the institutions.

The novelty of the article lies in the fact that it addresses the gap in the existing literature by exploring the levels of EQ, TU and student satisfaction in the context of private higher education in Pakistan. Furthermore, this study investigated whether TU served as a moderator in the relationship between student satisfaction and UNESCO-recommended EQ. This study elaborates on EQ indicators recommended by UNESCO in Pakistan’s private higher education sector.