Search results

This study investigates the impact of large-scale teaching in higher education on students’ preparedness for the workforce within the context of evolving labour market demands, the expansion of higher education and the application of high-impact teaching strategies. It synthesizes perspectives on employer work readiness, the challenges and opportunities of large-scale teaching and strategies for fostering a dynamic academia-industry feedback loop. This multifaceted approach ensures the relevance of curricula and graduates’ preparedness while addressing the skills gap through practical recommendations for aligning teaching methodologies with employer expectations.

The research methodically examines the multifaceted challenges and opportunities inherent in large-scale teaching. It focuses on sustaining student engagement, maintaining educational quality, personalizing learning experiences and cultivating essential soft skills in extensive student cohorts.

This study highlights the critical role of transversal skills in work readiness. It also uncovers that despite its challenges, large-scale teaching presents unique opportunities. The diversity of large student groups mirrors modern workplace complexities, and technological tools aid in personalizing learning experiences. Approaches like peer networking, innovative teaching methods, real-world simulations and collaborative resource utilization enrich education. The importance of experiential learning for augmenting large-scale teaching in honing soft skills is emphasized.

This manuscript contributes to the discourse on large-scale teaching, aligning it with employer expectations and the dynamic requirements of the job market. It offers a nuanced perspective on the challenges and opportunities this educational approach presents, providing insights for crafting engaging and effective learning experiences in large cohorts. The study uniquely integrates experiential learning, co-creation in education and industry-academia feedback loops, underscoring their importance in enhancing student work readiness in large-scale teaching.

Despite the emergence and strategic importance of project risk management (PRM), its diffusion is limited mainly to large companies, leaving a lack of empirical evidence addressing SMEs. Given the socio-economic importance of SMEs and their need to manage risks to ensure the success of their strategic and innovative projects, this research aims to investigate how to adopt PRM in SMEs with a positive cost–benefit ratio.

This study presents an exploratory and explanatory research conducted through multiple-case studies involving 10 projects performed in Spanish and Italian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The results obtained highlight how project features (commitment type, innovativeness, strategic relevance and managerial complexity) and firms' characteristics (sector of activity, production system and access to public incentives) influence PRM adoption, leading to different levels and types of benefits.

The paper offers practical indications about PRM phases, activities, tools and organizational aspects to be considered in different contexts to ensure the project's success and, ultimately, the company's growth and sustainability. Such indications could not be found in the literature.

This article considers the possibilities of and barriers to socialising tourism after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Such an approach allows us to transform tourism and thereby evolve it to be of wider benefit and less damaging to societies and ecologies than has been the case under the corporatised model of tourism.

This conceptual analysis draws on the theorisation of “tourism as a social force” and the new concept of “socialising tourism”. Using critical tourism approaches, it seeks to identify the dynamics that are evident in order to assess the possibilities for socialising tourism for social and ecological justice. It employs an Indigenous perspective that the past, present and future are interconnected in its consideration of tourism futures.

COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted tourism, travel and affiliated industries. In dealing with the crisis, borders have been shut, lockdowns imposed and international tourism curtailed. The pandemic foregrounded the renewal of social bonds and social capacities as governments acted to prevent economic and social devastation. This disruption of normality has inspired some to envision radical transformations in tourism to address the injustices and unsustainability of tourism. Others remain sceptical of the likelihood of transformation. Indeed, phenomena such as vaccine privilege and vaccine tourism are indicators that transformations must be enabled. The authors look to New Zealand examples as hopeful indications of the ways in which tourism might be transformed for social and ecological justice.

This conceptualisation could guide the industry to better stakeholder relations and sustainability.

Socialising tourism offers a fruitful pathway to rethinking tourism through a reorientation of the social relations it fosters and thereby transforming its social impacts for the better.

This work engages with the novel concept of “socialising tourism”. In connecting this new theory to the older theory of “tourism as a social force”, this paper considers how COVID-19 has offered a possible transformative moment to enable more just and sustainable tourism futures.