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The study compares how work-integrated learning (WIL) placement positioning, duration, assessment strategies and environment at three Southern African universities influence engineering students' academic and employability outcomes.

The study used a qualitative case study approach that drew on the principles of collaborative autoethnography (CAE). The researchers reflected on WIL placement practices, structure, assessment, environment and outcomes at their universities and then analysed the reflections using comparative descriptive techniques.

The study reports no uniformity among the universities in positioning WIL placement in the curriculum. It is done during end-of-year vacations, between the penultimate and final year or in the last year. The study found WIL placement positioning does not influence academic outcomes; however, the influence on employability outcomes needs further investigation. Components of WIL placement assessment are similar, presentations, logbooks and reports. However, there are differences in the weightings of the various assessment components and the contribution of the industry supervisor. There is a growing trend towards placing students within universities to mitigate the challenges of limited opportunities of placements available in the industry. The impact of this also needs to be further investigated. Lastly, there are policy-related challenges in placing international students. Work restrictions on student visas limit international students’ access to WIL placement. Southern African universities need to lobby the waivers to student visa restrictions that limit their participation in WIL programs if there are to succeed in their internationalisation efforts.

The study highlights the gaps in understanding Southern African universities' WIL placement practices, particularly relating to the positioning of WIL placement in the curriculum, the assessment methods used and the theory to work integration and employability outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on medical education and training, with many medical schools and training programs having to adapt to remote or online learning, social distancing measures and other challenges. This paper aimed to examine the disruption for clinical training, as it has reduced the opportunities for students and trainees to gain hands-on experience and interact with patients in person.

The ethnographic qualitative research design was chosen as the research methodology. Using Gibbs' reflective cycle, the researcher explored the psychiatry clerks' (final-year medical students) reflections on the disruption of their clinical training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings demonstrated that the students had a significant psychological impact on their coping capacities as the crisis progressed from shock and depression to resilience. The students being the key stakeholders provided a concrete foundation for the development of a framework for improving practices during uncertain times.

Students' reflections provided valuable insight into the pandemic’s impact on their psychosocial lives with uncertainty and incapacity to cope up with changing stressful dynamics. The results will assist in planning how to best support medical students' well-being during interruptions of their educational process brought about by similar future crises.

Improving service quality, student satisfaction and student loyalty is important to higher education institutions’ sustainable growth. The objectives of this study are a twofold: first, the study seeks to determine the dimensions of higher education service quality with a specific focus on Vietnam. Second, it examines how the service quality dimensions impact student satisfaction and student loyalty, with the moderating role of the university image.

This study followed a rigorous procedure, including interviews, a survey, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and reliability analysis to identify higher education service quality dimensions and their measures. After that, using the data obtained from 1,550 university students in Vietnam, confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the identified dimensions and structural equation modeling was used to test a proposed model explaining the outcomes of higher education service quality.

The findings reveal five dimensions of higher education service quality: academic aspect, nonacademic aspect, programming issues, facilities and industry interaction. Most of these factors have a positive influence on student satisfaction. In addition, the university image moderates the positive relationship between student satisfaction and student loyalty.

This study’s findings highlight the complexity of service quality in the higher education context and encourage higher education institutions to improve their service quality in image to enhance student satisfaction and loyalty.

This study suggests a unique measure of higher education service quality dimensions and provides fresh insights into how they impact student satisfaction and loyalty in Vietnam.

The present study investigates the impact of digital entrepreneurial education and training and its impact on the digital entrepreneurial intention (EI) through the mediating character of entrepreneurial competence.

A total of 391 survey responses were collected from employees using convenient and snowball sampling methods.

Digital entrepreneurial education and training showed a positive influence on entrepreneurial competence and EI, with entrepreneurial competence mediating the relationship between digital entrepreneurial education and training practices and EI.

This study is intended to assist the development of digital entrepreneurs. The implications of this study are also useful for governments, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and various international development institutions.

The novelty of this study relates to exploring the relationship between digital entrepreneurial education and training, entrepreneurial competence and digital EI.

Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective. The authors analyse the level, reach and quality of social policy delivery to working-age women across the areas of health policy, social protection and employment policy during 2000–2021.

The article draws on qualitative research deploying the scoping review method. The data consist of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics and other types of “grey” literature.

Tanzania has made significant advancements in the legal frameworks around welfare provision and has instituted increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans. The health and social protection sectors, in particular, have witnessed the introduction of large-scale measures expanding social policy implementation. However, social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors.

Social policy delivery and implementation have increased and diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the new millennium, with a growing integration of gender-specific policy objectives. However, limited social policy scholarship has focused on the gendered effects of broader social policy models in SSA. The article remedies the concomitant knowledge gaps by examining various social policies and their impacts on working-age women in Mainland Tanzania. The authors also engage with the theoretical welfare regime literature and present an analytical framework for gender-sensitive assessment of emerging social policy models in the Global South.

The implementation of BIM in the construction industry requires the coevolution of the various aspects of the BIM ecosystem. The human dimension is a very important dimension of the ecosystem necessary for BIM implementation. It is imperative to study this aspect of the BIM ecosystem both from the employer perspective and employee availability to provide insights for stakeholders (job seekers, employers, students, researchers, policymakers, higher education institutions, career advisors and curriculum developers) interested in the labour market dynamics.

To understand the BIM actor roles through the employer lens and the actual BIM actors in the construction industry, this study employed data mining of job adverts from LinkedIn and Mncjobs website. Content analysis was employed to gain insights into the data collected. Also, through a quantitative approach, the existing BIM actor roles were identified.

The study identified the employers' expectations of BIM actors; however, it is noted that the BIM actor recruitment space is still a loose one as recruiters put out open advertisements to get a large pool of applicants. From the data analysed, it is concluded that the BIM actor role is not an entirely new profession. However, it simply exists as construction industry professionals with BIM tool skills. Also, the professional development route is not well defined yet.

This study presents a realistic angle to BIM actor roles hence enhancing BIM implementation from the human perspective. The findings present an insight into the preferred against the actual.

Educational design patterns offer practical strategies that can be shared and adapted to address problems in teaching and learning. This article explores how educational design patterns for connected learning at scale at an Australian university may be adapted to a Vietnamese higher education context.

12 educational design patterns that address the challenges of active learning and large teaching team management are discussed. The authors then critically reflect on their cross-cultural adaptation for the higher education context, from an Australian to a Vietnamese university.

Transitioning from passive to active learning strategies and effectively leading large teaching teams present similar challenges across our contexts. Educational design patterns, when dynamically adapted, may assist educators to teach skills that are critical for work and the future. Higher education institutions globally could enhance their practices by incorporating international best practice approaches to educational design.

The Connected Learning at Scale (CLaS) educational design patterns explored in this article offer solution-oriented strategies that promote a more active learning experience. This paper identifies adaptations for educators, especially those in Vietnamese higher education that respect traditional structures, cultural nuances and resource limitations in implementation.

Whilst educational design patterns are well-researched in the Western contexts, few studies analyse design patterns in an Asian, and in particular the Vietnamese context. More research is needed in the cross-cultural adaptation of educational design patterns that joins practice and theory.