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This paper aims to use an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and combine this with the fuzzy theory to identify key indicators influencing English-medium instruction (EMI) in the shipping courses of Taiwan’s higher education.

Based on a literature review and expert interviews, an evaluation model with 4 indicators and 13 sub-indicators was developed. Questionnaire samples included university English teachers (eight), university shipping teachers (nine) and shipping practitioners (eight).

Using 25 effective samples, the results found that “teachers’ characteristics” is the most important indicator, followed by “syllabus design”, “university resources” and “students’ characteristics”. Such a finding could provide valuable teaching and managerial strategies for EMI design in both university and industry sectors.

Expert questionnaire targets have focused on university English teachers, university shipping teachers and shipping practitioners. Other related field experts could be further surveyed and compared in the future studies.

The findings of EMI indicators in the shipping courses could be used for course and material design by shipping companies, shipping authorities and universities. It is expected that these indicators could inform the provision of reasonable teaching resources allocation.

This paper provides important guidance for designing EMI in shipping courses. Related stakeholders will be able to understand important concepts regarding designing EMI courses.

First, EMI indicators in the shipping courses have seldom been studied in the past. They are, however, important for both shipping industries and education intuitions. Second, as its method, this paper adopts decision analysis quantitative tool to complement previous qualitative studies regarding EMI studies.

Purpose of this research is to shed light on the changes caused by shipping sulphur regulation, which will globally take off during years 2015 and 2020. It has significant effects on diesel markets globally, but especially in regions, where demanding 0.1 per cent level is required. One of these regions is the Baltic Sea. It is relatively undealt issue, how this forthcoming change will affect these specific sub-regions of stiff 0.1 per cent sulphur level demand and their transportation modes with different tax obligations.

The authors use second-hand data from various different sources, earlier research as well as simulation to estimate the effects on the diesel markets and transportation prices in the Baltic Sea region. Different transportation modes have diverging taxation treatment on diesel oil use, which complicates analysis further.

Based on research findings, it is rather probable that diesel markets for sulphur-free diesel oil shall face price spike in the beginning of 2015 in the Baltic Sea region. This is mostly explained with needed large-scale scrubber investment and short-time span to complete these (there are both technical and financial challenges). Therefore, numerous ships shall enter sulphur-free diesel oil market. Based on the simulation study, freight transportation will mostly be hurt in shipping, whereas road and rail shall face smaller price increases. Results are mostly explained with taxation treatment, where shipping is still using tax-free diesel oil, and no fixed taxes are hedging this transportation mode from sudden price changes.

Analysis concerns only Baltic Sea region, and effects and changes in the entire Europe from sulphur regulation change in 2015 are unknown. This would mean to extent study to North Sea. In addition, taxation system harmonization is not yet complete in Europe, and differences exist between member states. Research work was completed with diesel oil tax treatment regarding different transportation modes in Finland.

Based on this study, short sea shipping will be hurt by regulation change in 2015. However, in the future, this transportation mode shall face additional cost increases, as most probably, tax harmonization in diesel markets shall lead to fixed taxes added on shipping diesel. So, transportation mode shall face difficult and challenging times ahead.

Research is seminal study from possible sulphur regulation change implications in transportation mode level. It takes into account taxation treatment, cost share of diesel in transportation mode level and possible diesel price change. Until today, no other study exists in this detailed level.

This study has a scope limited to a specific course and changes integrated to the core of the KTH naval architecture master program. The students in the program have earlier experience from engineering applications in a general sustainability perspective and understand the basic concepts within sustainability. Therefore, to introduce further steps a new course module was introduced in 2018 focusing on safety management and social sustainability. The purpose of this study is to identify and document the pedagogic lessons for a course module where sustainable development (SD) is discipline-specific.

This study is a case study that qualitatively investigates the stainability effects of the implementation of the new course module. The course and program activities are compared to the results of a previous study in 2017 on the sustainable development learning elements (SDLEs) in the program and discussed in relation to more general SD initiatives.

From the analysis, it is identified that the perspectives presented were new to a substantial part of the students. This study also shows that the effects of the specific module here studied, with a focus on the skill of maritime social sustainability development, differ from more general sustainability literacy. The new perspective affected the thinking about the core of the students’ studies, ship design, in a way that general knowledge on sustainability has not. This was achieved with a combination of suitable tools and perspectives in combination with contextual knowledge and a frame of reference. The contextual knowledge and a frame of reference are here present in education as a result of relating the sustainability case to the core of the program.

The result relates the pedagogical change described to SDLEs and to the ambition of conceive, design, implement and operate approaches. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a discussion on how social sustainability can be implemented in engineering education and the role of integrated discipline-specific sustainability modules.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that the measurement of salivary amylase activity is an effective index to evaluate the stress of a ship navigator for safe navigation training and education.

Evaluation comes from the simulator and actual on‐board experiments. The subjects are real captains who have unlimited licenses and cadets who are senior students at Kobe University, navigation course. Stress is evaluated for several situations where a ship navigator makes a lot of decisions, in this case in a narrow passage, entering a port and leaving a port.

Salivary amylase activity occurs when a ship navigator makes a decision regarding ship handling and collision avoidance. By measuring salivary amylase activity when a student is under duress, cadets' ship‐handling training can be evaluated while onboard a vessel.

Future research will develop cross‐indices with the salivary amylase activity and other physiological indices (nasal temperature and heart rate variability (R‐R interval)), complementary to each other. The salivary amylase activity registers the stress quickly on the spot. Then the nasal temperature and R‐R interval registers the trend and the quick response to the stress (mental workload).

The paper describes an effective index which is useful for evaluating a ship navigator's stress for safe navigation.

Ship navigator's skill and cadet's on‐board training have been evaluated according to performance and a questionnaire as a quantitative evaluation; moreover, stress is evaluated using salivary amylase activity.

Ship route prediction (SRP) is a quite complicated task, which enables the determination of the next position of a ship after a given period of time, given its current position. This paper aims to describe a study, which compares five families of multiclass classification algorithms to perform SRP.

Tested algorithm families include: Naive Bayes (NB), nearest neighbors, decision trees, linear algorithms and extension from binary. A common structure for all the algorithm families was implemented and adapted to the specific case, according to the test to be done. The tests were done on one month of real data extracted from automatic identification system messages, collected around the island of Malta.

Experiments show that K-nearest neighbors and decision trees algorithms outperform all the other algorithms. Experiments also demonstrate that linear algorithms and NB have a very poor performance.

This study is limited to the area surrounding Malta. Thus, findings cannot be generalized to every context. However, the methodology presented is general and can help other researchers in this area to choose appropriate methods for their problems.

The results of this study can be exploited by applications for maritime surveillance to build decision support systems to monitor and predict ship routes in a given area. For example, to protect the marine environment, the use of SRP techniques could be used to protect areas at risk such as marine protected areas, from illegal fishing.

The paper proposes a solid methodology to perform tests on SRP, based on a series of important machine learning algorithms for the prediction.

This article examines entrepreneurship courses offered by engineering faculties in Canada. The venturing rate of engineering students, whether the venturing rate increases if students have taken a course in entrepreneurship, and the type of ventures created are also explored. A recent census and an empirical study of two groups of engineering graduates from a Canadian university were utilized. Findings have implications for educators and administrators and for policy-makers interested in encouraging economic growth.

IT is well known that librarianship or library science and information work or information science as the common educational, professional and scientific discipline is everywhere undergoing great change and development. During its continual and relatively fast development, this discipline has at the same time to solve the increasing tasks connected with the problems of the so‐called information explosion.

Shipping courses contain much technical and specialist knowledge and present particular challenges for English medium instruction (EMI). This paper aims to investigate both student perceptions of the importance and satisfaction level of EMI in shipping courses in higher education in Taiwan and the perceptions of expert stakeholders through qualitative interviews.

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is used to gather data on participants’ perceptions of what is (un)important and (un)satisfactory. Based on past studies, four dimensions with 20 items were developed and 121 effective questionnaires were collected. Further, qualitative interviews with expert stakeholders (n = 9) are undertaken to gather data to contextualize and complement the quantitative student data.

Findings show students attributed high importance but low satisfaction to items such as course learning objectives and students’ English level, and low importance and high satisfaction to items such as electronic teaching platform and relevance of subject to practice. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were used to divide samples into three groups. Qualitative interview results confirm many of the quantitative findings but also show where some quantitative findings require more attention or investment when delivering EMI programmes.

Questionnaire samples focus on university students. Other related field samples (e.g. EMI teachers, shipping teachers, English teachers, etc.) could be surveyed and compared in future studies. Qualitative interviews could also be expanded to other stakeholders such as government policymakers.

The findings of IPA in the shipping courses and the qualitative interviews can be used for both teaching design and implementation in related courses by university lecturers and other stakeholders (e.g. policy and decision-makers). Such approaches can enhance students’ learning motivation and teaching performance.

This paper provides important guidance and diagnosis for how to introduce English teaching in shipping courses. Related courses can be further applied in higher education to popularize and promote EMI teaching in shipping and related fields.

EMI has seldom been studied in the context of shipping courses in the past. This paper adopts IPA method and qualitative interviews to complement previous studies and address gaps in recent research. It is expected that the research findings could be adapted and applied in other fields.

Presents the thoughts on decision processes of Chester I. Barnard, one of the century’s greatest management theorists. Includes his classic article, “Mind in everyday affairs”; his unpublished book, “The Significance of Decisive Behaviour in Social Action”; his correspondence with Herbert Simon, and significant comments found in his personal papers.

This study aims to examine variables and factors in vocational awareness and attitudes that affect the vocational aspiration of seafaring course students who are potential future seafaring employees.

A literature review was conducted to identify factors that prompt students in seafaring courses to pursue seafaring careers, followed by a design of preliminary questionnaire questions to survey students’ perception on the conditions of seafaring careers (i.e. vocational awareness) and their intention to pursue a seafaring career (i.e., vocational aspiration). A total of 744 seafaring course students in four Taiwanese universities completed a questionnaire developed according to the previous studies. A structured equation modelling was conducted in this research including model validity, goodness of fit, model correction and mediation effects.

With a model consisting of four factors for vocational awareness, three factors for overall attitudes and vocational aspiration as a dependent variable, the results showed that factors of vocational awareness and students’ overall attitudes were significantly correlated, and the factors of overall attitudes exhibit strong mediation effects on vocational aspiration from vocational awareness. The results confirmed that the factors are important determinants for the vocational aspiration of students.

The findings of this study provide a comprehensive approach to understand students’ seafaring aspiration for the universities, governments and shipping companies. Seafaring policies and management are discussed from the research findings.