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Creating a mindset for research, including the development of professional research skills and critical thinking, is of the utmost importance in preparing students for the business world. To help faculty with this mindset, we discuss novel approaches for incorporating professional research and interactions into the undergraduate classroom, although the recommendations can apply to the entire curriculum. We describe three scenarios where our recommendations might apply – research/financial, tax, and accounting information system courses. Using a professional accounting research course and a financial course as examples, we start out broadly discussing a practitioner-coauthored professional case study approach that is applicable to any course, at any level. We then present a capstone undergraduate tax research course followed by an introduction of a specific project in an accounting information systems course. We include suggested syllabi, projects, and assessment rubrics throughout the discussion.

The study assesses pre-service teachers' attitudes, confidence in research and intentions to use research by comparing the effectiveness of practical versus theoretical training in research methods courses.

This natural experiment examines the impact of the adaptations made to a research methods course for 848 pre-service teachers, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were naturally divided into two cohorts, each attending either the applied version, which required the completion of a whole research study, or the theoretical version, which did not require data collection and analyses. The data were collected through three questionnaires measuring attitudes, confidence and intentions toward research.

Inferential statistics revealed that pre-service teachers in the theoretical course (1) had more positive attitudes toward research and less anxiety, (2) had more intentions to integrate research in their daily practice and (3) had more confidence in engaging in educational research, compared to the pre-service teachers who completed the applied version of the course.

This study uniquely capitalizes on course adaptations, imposed due to the pandemic, to compare attitudes toward research. This is an ideal comparison because comparing attitudes of participants from different contexts involves many confounding variables. The study’s significance is amplified as, it not only elucidates the variances in attitudes, but also underscores the intricate relationship these attitudes share with the design of research courses. The insights yielded by this study offer substantial potential for reshaping pedagogical strategies in research methods instruction, thereby serving as a cornerstone for future educational innovations.

Entrepreneurship-oriented courses are increasingly being offered in higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world. However, in the case of Oman, where this study was conducted, little or no research has been conducted, to date, to explore the perceptions of students and faculty members regarding the entrepreneurship-oriented courses they participate in, which is a serious gap in the literature. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the beliefs and conceptions that learners and faculty at a private HEI in Muscat, Oman, had about the course entitled Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation (ENVC).

The primary and secondary research questions are addressed using a mixed-methods approach that includes an online student questionnaire answered by 110 students who had studied the ENVC course, a focus group discussion with eight students facilitated by MS Teams and semi-structured interviews with two faculty members.

The findings revealed that the study participants had a very positive view of the ENVC course discussed here as they pointed to several benefits, including improved knowledge of business and entrepreneurship concepts, increased familiarity with the local business environment, development of entrepreneurial intention and improvement of their critical thinking, creativity and innovation skills. In addition, the results revealed some concerns among the participating students, particularly regarding the lack of adequate training sessions on risk management and financial planning. The participants also requested hands-on experience through industrial entrepreneurship training and in-residence-entrepreneurship programs.

This study raises a number of possibilities for further research on this type of course in terms of students’ employability skills, know-how and agency when the time comes for them to enter the real world of business and employment. Future work would benefit from using a longitudinal survey on a group of alumni to triangulate and compare the various findings that were reached here. It would certainly be even more fruitful if conducted at two or more HEIs and with larger population samples to ensure broad coverage, representation and generalization. Work along these lines would certainly refine and extend our findings.

This study has significant pedagogical implications for future graduate students seeking employment, entrepreneurship course developers and faculty. Relatively, the educational outcomes of entrepreneurship education will also rely on the way entrepreneurship is being taught to students. It is recommended that entrepreneurship teaching should focus on cognitive development and active implementation of in-house incubation for well-planned innovative business ideas. This will provide opportunities for students to gain real-life experiences and identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the areas and skills that need to be maintained; hence, further research on the effectiveness of in-house incubation could best be considered for the next study. Another concern raised in this study is the lack of training in financial planning. Hence, further research can be considered on how to improve the financial planning skills of students for a start-up journey.

This course is designed in alignment with Oman Vision 2040, which places great emphasis on entrepreneurship as it plays an important role in the planned economic diversification and sustainability, in which innovation derived from entrepreneurship development will be used as the main driver for the development of infrastructure and educational systems that encourage entrepreneurship. Moreover, the ENVC course focuses on the concept of social entrepreneurship. It inculcates a sense of responsibility for supporting the immediate society among students. Learning the perceptions of students and teachers will provide opportunities to achieve their academic goals, which will reap economic and financial returns in the long run. The development of entrepreneurial skills and intentions of students will eventually help in boosting the country’s economy and its social fabric, thus improving the overall quality of life of Omani society.

Even though this study is an exploratory investigation, the framework sets out clear empirical insights into the entrepreneurship course development, its main contents, assessments and learners’ and faculty members’ perceptions of the design, intent, content and delivery of the ENVC course and has crucial implications for all the stakeholders. The originality of this case study lies in the fact that it is the first of its kind in the body of research as it links theory to practice and will be a useful reference for entrepreneurship course developers, higher education faculty and students.

This research investigates the impact of learners' non-substantive responses in online course forums, referred to as online listening responses, on e-learning performance. A common type of response in online course forums, online listening responses consist of brief, non-substantive replies/comments (e.g. “agree,” “I see,” “thank you,” “me too”) and non-textual inputs (e.g. post-voting, emoticons) in online discussions. Extant literature on online forum participation focuses on learners' active participation with substantive inputs and overlooks online listening responses. This research, by contrast, stresses the value of online listening responses in e-learning and their heterogeneous effects across learner characteristics. It calls for recognition and encouragement from online instructors and online forum designers to support this activity.

The large-scale proprietary dataset comes from a leading MOOC (massive open online courses) platform in China. The dataset includes 68,126 records of learners in five MOOCs during 2014–2018. An ordinary least squares model is used to analyze the data and test the hypotheses.

Online listening responses in course forums, along with learners' substantive inputs, positively influence learner performance in online courses. The effects are heterogeneous across learner characteristics, being more prominent for early course registrants, learners with full-time jobs and learners with more e-learning experience, but weaker for female learners.

This research distinguishes learners' brief, non-substantive responses (online listening responses) and substantive inputs (online speaking) as two types of active participation in online forums and provides empirical evidence for the importance of online listening responses in e-learning. It contributes to online forum research by advancing the active-passive dichotomy of online forum participation to a nuanced classification of learner behaviors. It also adds to e-learning research by generating insights into the positive and heterogeneous value of learners' online listening responses to e-learning outcomes. Finally, it enriches online listening research by introducing and examining online listening responses, thereby providing a new avenue to probe online discussions and e-learning performance.

HyFlex course design is an effective instructional course design that combines active and transformative learning techniques. HyFlex course design encourages active learning by focusing on interactive activities, discussions, and collaboration. It also allows learners to collaborate effectively and flexibly as a community, providing peer support and opportunities for authentic dialogue and learning experiences. HyFlex course design provides the opportunity for transformative learning through its ability to offer personalized educational experiences to individuals. It facilitates greater customization of the learning experience, allowing individual learners to access tailored educational modules, offer personalized educational experiences to individuals, and effectively develop and build independent and critical thinking skills. This conceptual review, supported by implications from HyFlex literature and triangulated with experts' views undertaking a Delphi study, facilitates understanding the current state of research in HyFlex course design and future application strategies. Existing research has identified HyFlex courses as a promising means of engaging students in active learning. Allowing students to learn through flexibly predesigned mixed online and in-person experiences enables higher levels of student autonomy and supports students in taking more ownership of their learning. This approach can facilitate an understanding of how HyFlex courses can improve active learning practices in higher education. The review study findings identify the reported alignment issues and challenges, suggest four strategies and actions for policymakers and stakeholders, and provide a suggested research agenda for bridging identified research gaps.

Future research can provide evidence of the benefits of HyFlex course design and how flexible course design can address the challenges of traditional face-to-face courses, such as reduced student engagement, lack of student-centered approaches, and limited support for different learning styles. Further research can focus on strategies that can be used to promote active learning in HyFlex courses. Moreover, research can investigate how this kind of course design can equip educators with the skills and knowledge needed to design and implement effective and meaningful active learning experiences. Finally, research can assess the potential impact of HyFlex course design on student outcomes, including performance, satisfaction, and engagement.

This study scrutinizes the attitudes of postgraduate students specializing in education toward research at one University of Education in Myanmar.

Having collected data from 121 Master in Education (MEd) students in three education departments, the study validated Papanastasiou's (2014) Revised-Attitude toward Research (R-ATR) scale by performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A one-way MANOVA was used to establish the significance of mean differences between groups and ANOVA was used for the same purpose among groups.

The R-ATR scale is fit with the sample (χ²/df = 1.60), and the students' attitudes toward research are favorable with mean value for research usefulness (5.98), positive research predispositions (5.55) and research anxiety (3.61), despite feeling stressed and anxious. There was a significant difference in the students' attitudes toward research regarding their departments, while no significant difference was found based on their research experience, gender and age.

There should be an effective mechanism in implementing the research course and in online delivery mode, collaboration between the faculties in the process of revision and review of the research courses, effective strategies of improving research instructors' quality and also internationalization to sustain students' positive attitudes toward research and to reduce their stress and anxiety.

This research is empirically novel, and the initiative attempts to first use the R-ATR scale in teacher education in Myanmar.

With the increasing popularity of online courses, their quality has become a public concern. Based on the perspective of knowledge management, this study aims to identify comprehensive and granular quality factors of online courses and analyze the relationships between the factors.

Following the principles of the grounded theory, interpretive structural modeling and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis methods, this research uses reviews and comments garnered from Zhihu, which is the most popular online question-and-answer community in China, to conduct the analysis.

Based on the text data, 50 factors that potentially affect the quality of online courses are obtained. The analysis identifies the hierarchical relationships and dependent correlations between the factors.

The research uses the knowledge transformation model to classify content elements according to their degree of descriptiveness and provides practical and effective suggestions for improving the quality of online courses.

The purpose of this study is to generate knowledge about assessment methods in blended business education, which have become increasingly important to establish sustainable assessment practices that support knowledge acquisition for undergraduate students in business administration at a Colombian university.

For the analysis, a two groups comparison was performed using a nonequivalent control group design with a sample of 420 students. As this study wants to find insights to improve the knowledge on assessment topics in marketing research (MR) education, it was focused on the students from the business administration program. This study also uses individual scores from the state test as prior cognitive scores and the high school classification provided by the National Ministry of Education in Colombia (2012).

It was found that the variables that best predict performance on the MR course examinations were the mathematics skills and reading comprehension scores on the state test. The study also showed a better performance of female students on both assessment methods. There were no significant differences between the assessment methods or among the high school levels.

One of the limitations of this study is the limited number of items on the tests. Additionally, the authors recommend conducting an analysis of the differences between the testing items to provide a detailed explanation of students’ performance when comparing computer-based testing and paper-and-pencil testing.

Further design of teaching material and assessments online and offline, based on local and regional marketing problems, is suggested. As the current text and readings are more oriented to the English-speaking contexts, most of the problems presented are oriented to multinational companies and brands.

Insights into the skills required for future jobs provide valuable guidance (World Economic Forum, 2020). Essential skills for emerging roles, like data scientists, can find robust support within the MR course. To further enrich in-class and online exercises with Excel and SPSS, Colombian educators can leverage data sets obtained from sources like the national statistics office and international market intelligence databases available through the university’s library, including Passport and Statista. Engaging with authentic data sets provides students with a more profound understanding of practical applications in MR.

This approach facilitates the identification of key variables, such as assessment and cognitive abilities in math and reading, which predict students’ knowledge acquisition in MR. It not only offers insights into the relevant factors influencing learning in MR but also provides valuable feedback. Additionally, it suggests potential avenues for future research in this field.

This chapter proposes authentic leadership as a generic competence and an integral part of doctoral education regardless of field of study. The authors explore its potential to enhance the development of doctoral candidates and academics and search for answers to the questions: Can and should authentic leadership be developed as a generic competence in doctoral education? How can it be designed and implemented in a doctoral training module? What would its learning outcomes be? The authors address these questions in the context of doctoral education. They assert that authentic leadership training should be mandatory for all doctoral candidates, and that supervisors should be actively engaged in the development of this underappreciated transferrable skill.

The advancement of a profession depends on factors such as firm education, training programmes and vibrant professional associations. The purpose of this study is to provide baseline information on archives and records management (ARM) professionals from Africa, including their views on education and training programmes. Related studies have been limited to investigating the experiences of graduates from a few institutions within a limited jurisdiction. Similar studies have not been conducted by African-based ARM associations.

This study’s survey approach was administered electronically. Two surveys explored themes through 10 research questions in three categories: background information; characteristics of the education; and types of courses and extent covered during the study.

The two surveys had 107 and 179 respondents, respectively, domiciled in 19 African countries. In both studies, about 75% of the respondents had an undergraduate- or master-level qualification. Between 69% and 87% of the respondents from the first and second surveys, respectively, had completed their educational programmes within their home countries. There was varied sentiment on the types of courses and level of coverage within their studies. Legal and technology aspects were less covered in the curriculum than core subjects.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first with findings from ARM respondents across several African countries. It provides insight into the demographics and educational programmes. This study’s unique contribution provides baseline data for more detailed and nuanced studies that will explore data and investigate patterns within and among individual countries on the continent.