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Meaning-centered education situates meaning at the center of teaching and learning (Kovbasyuk & Blessinger, 2013). By incorporating learning objectives from additional learning domains – namely the affective domain – meaning-centered learning should enhance students’ personal and professional identities, as they reinforce existing knowledge through the continuous conscious acquisition of knowledge across learning domains. For this study, instructors integrated the human resource development (HRD) constructs of Level 1 and Level 2 evaluations into an online doctoral strategic planning course to achieve three goals: (A) increase student engagement, (B) assess affective domain learning outcomes, and (C) practice innovative teaching to reinforce creative meaning-centered learning. Infusing an online curriculum with affective learning domain outcomes and weekly formative assessment activities allowed instructors to monitor and address affective attributes. Results suggest that the implementation of Level 1 and Level 2 evaluations as weekly formative assessments increased student engagement. Extended analysis promoted a deeper understanding of the roles that emotions and attitudes play in online learning. Affective learning outcomes were attained as these additional weekly exercises promoted meaning-centered collaboration with students while decreasing the power-related distance between learners and instructors.

The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in education is increasingly gaining importance in institutions of higher education. Operationally, ICT has helped to cut costs and speed up transactions by streamlining and automating processes. Pedagogically, it has enabled online, hybrid, and technology enhanced learning as well as a host of other capabilities, from learning management systems to student information system, and from student affairs to academic affairs. ICT is now embedded in every aspect of university life. The role of ICT is found to increase the value of classroom delivery, it has helped in the growth of research, expanding horizons for students mainly with limited accessibility to education and it has created an overall positive impact in the teaching–learning environment in general. There are always two sides to the coin and in this case inaccessibility, economic disparity, and ineffective implementation of ICT has also created impediments for effectively adopting and diffusing integration of ICT into pedagogy. This volume is a collection of interventions and collaborative practices across the world that showcases the multifaceted ways of how various institutions have been engaged in supporting teaching and learning with the use of technology and how it is equipping our future generation with the skills required to face a changing job market.

Electronic Information Pilot Nixed for Depository Libraries. The House Legislative Appropriations Subcommittee on June 10, and the full Appropriations Committee on June 18, passed over without prejudice the Government Printing Office's request for $800,000 to get pilot projects started to test distribution to depository libraries of government information in electronic formats.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

Although trafficking of persons for commercial sex has been increasingly recognized as a community level problem most estimates of the prevalence of sex trafficking in the USA are made by federal entities and vary depending on the data sources used. Little is known about how local police agencies assess and understand sex trafficking in their own communities. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

To help fill this gap, the current study using survey data from a sample of local police agencies across the USA (n=72) examines law enforcement agencies’ knowledge of and experience with addressing local sex trafficking problems in their jurisdiction.

The majority of police agencies reported that sex trafficking is a problem in their jurisdictions and that they have a special unit that has a primary responsibility for addressing sex trafficking issues. Agencies with a special unit tend to use multiple sources of information including official record, intelligence data and personal experience to estimate the community’s trafficking problems when compared to agencies without a unit; however, most of agencies primarily depend on their professional experience.

This is the first study to examine the data sources used by local police agencies to estimate the scope and nature of their community’s sex trafficking problem, and the findings have important policy implications for understanding the reliability and validity of these estimates, and for their potential use to develop and implement data driven responses to sex trafficking problems.

This paper presents an overview of the articles used in this edition of Advances in Health Care Management. The beginning of the article gives the reader a history of bioterrorist activity within the United States, and how these events have led to current situations. It also provides a model for health care leaders to follow when looking at a bioterrorist attack. The model includes descriptions of how the articles within this book relate to an overall bioterrorist formula. Through this, the reader shall be able to deduce which individual article fits into the vastness of healthcare research pertaining to bioterrorism.

Based on self-determination theory (SDT), this study aims to determine the motivation factors of reviewers writing long reviews in the anime industry.

This study analyzes 171,188 online review data collected from an online anime community (MyAnimeList.net).

The findings show that intensity of emotions, experience in writing reviews and helpful votes in past reviews are the most important factors and positively influence review length. The overall rating of the anime moderates the effects of some motivation factors. Moreover, reviewers commenting on their favorite or nonfavorite anime also have varied motivation factors. Furthermore, this study has addressed the p-value problem due to the large sample size.

This study provides a comprehensive and theoretical understanding of reviewers' motivation for writing long reviews.

Online communities can incorporate the insights from this study into website design and motivate reviewers to write long reviews.

Many past studies have investigated what reviews are more helpful. Review length is the most important factor of review helpfulness and positively affects it. However, few studies have examined the determinants of review length. This study attempts to address this issue.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the critical success factors (CSFs) for effective project stakeholder management at the local government level in Ghana.

The study used data from questionnaires administered to project stakeholders for identifying and ranking CSFs.

The study identified the top five CSFs for stakeholder management at the local government level in Ghana to be: communicating with and engaging stakeholders; identifying stakeholders properly; formulating a clear project mission statement; keeping and promoting good relationships; and analyzing stakeholder conflicts and coalitions.

Generalization of the findings should be done with caution since the scope of data collection was limited to district assemblies in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. Nevertheless the results of the study are, however, useful and indicative and can lend direction to future research.

This paper has contributed to the growing body of knowledge related to CSFs for local government projects. The results should help understand factors which are of priority to stakeholders when assessing their involvement in projects. Further, the findings could form the basis for competency development of local government personnel in specific areas where improvements are required.

The paper identified CSFs for effective project stakeholder management at the local level. Most studies on critical factors in project environments have focused on CSFs and project success and thus this study delves into an area which has not received much attention in the literature.