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Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is possibly “the richest and most accessible service-learning experience” in the marketing curriculum (Petkus, 2000, p. 68). Yet, despite this recognition, scholars and practitioners continue to lament the pronounced theory-practice gap between how IMC is taught and the practice of it in industry (Schultz and Patti, 2009; Kerr and Kelly, 2017). This research embeds IMC practice within a classroom setting and subsequently explores student marketers' perceptions of their skill development through experiential client-based learning.

An in-depth qualitative study demonstrates the value of integrating experiential learning within an IMC course, captured through students' reflective practice.

Evidence suggests that experiential, client-based projects are suitable for fostering key practice-based skills in the classroom through students “experiencing” IMC at work. However, this is not always easy. In fact, building key skills such as leadership, motivation, communications, organisation and teamwork presents various challenges for students, whilst students appear unaware of other pertinent skills (e.g. persuasion, critical thinking) gained through exposure to “real-world” IMC tasks.

Instructors adopting experiential learning in the marketing classroom have an opportunity to actively design tasks to embed key workplace skills to bridge the theory-practice gap. Client-based projects offer fertile ground for students to experience marketing in action whilst ultimately bolstering their confidence in their workplace skills.

This research contributes to the marketing education literature and acknowledges the importance of embedding key workplace skills into the contemporary marketing curriculum. An overview of challenges and solutions for instructors seeking to adopt experiential learning via client-based projects in the IMC classroom is presented within this research.

There is a global concern about the effectiveness of vocational education and training (VET) programmes in developing job-related skills and competencies for real-world environments for disadvantaged and unemployed youths. Experiential learning (EL) is a major component of VET programmes. This article aims to examine the effects of facilitating VET through EL theory to promote youths' skills acquisition. The study looks at the effects of material resources on the use of experiential learning theory (ELT), the types of EL and the contribution of ELT to VET programmes.

The research design mainly entails a qualitative research design and research method to allow the researcher to view the reality as is experienced from the inside out by the trainees and training centre managers on important data for a thorough understanding. The study participants were 512 young trainees who completed different training courses from the VET programmes and 24 centre managers in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.

The findings reveal that the use of ELT in VET programmes helped the trainees to gain real-world skills, hence contributing to their empowerment in terms of work experience and competence for their future employment. Based on the findings, the study concludes that ELT is an effective instrument to promote VET programmes for disadvantaged and unemployed youths.

The practical and social implications of the findings are that, while disadvantaged youths cannot access and afford higher education, public and private sectors can remedy their situation by providing non-school-based technical and vocational training to help such youths enter the labour market. The findings will motivate the providers of skills development for unemployed youths to use ELT in designing course curricula, planning resources and directing teaching-learning approaches to help trainees to acquire skills and competencies to perform tasks close to real-work situations.

The socio-economic implication of the article is that skills development plays an important role in poverty reduction. Investing in the skills development of citizens is vital to raise the incomes of poor groups and to reduce poverty (ILO, 2018). Although the causes of unemployment have also to do with economic factors in a country, skills development is an essential ingredient in developing capacities for labour market entry and increased income generation of a vulnerable group of people.

The article is significant because the study provides new insights into the use of ELT in VET programmes to improve their effectiveness in developing job-related skills and competencies for real-world environments for disadvantaged and unemployed youths. The study contributes to the body of knowledge by establishing a solid base for the evidence-informed practice of the effects of facilitating the VET programme through ELT to promote skills acquisition for the employment of unemployed and disadvantaged youths.

This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have increasingly created social innovation (SI) programmes, as a way to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These community-oriented and field-based programmes are difficult to ally with conventional classroom education. This study explores how these programmes could integrate the participatory approach and what would be the benefits. It also investigates the effectiveness of the experiential learning approach for teaching sustainability.

A case study method is used to document SI projects initiated by an HEI programme in rural India.

It was found that the participatory approach contributes to empowering communities and also benefits the students in terms of academic, professional and personal growth. Empirical findings show that experiential learning is an efficient method to teach sustainability. Ultimately, both pedagogical approaches are found to be mutually beneficial.

This study fills a gap in the literature, by providing empirical evidence on how HEI can implement innovative educational strategies such as participatory approach and experiential learning in their programmes towards teaching sustainability. A conceptual model for HEI interested in developing similar programmes is also proposed. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies focusing on the context of Indian HEI.

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.

Organisational learning drives tourism organisations towards more sustainable tourism. Digital transformation also provides opportunities for sustainable tourism development. This study aims to combine these perspectives and explore how digital transformation enables organisational learning to contribute to sustainable tourism, following organisational learning theory (OLT).

Based on a critical realist paradigm, this study focuses on developing an in-depth understanding of organisational learning in tourism organisations. Thirty qualitative interviews with tourism organisations participating in an executive development programme (EDP) show how tourism organisations create, retain and transfer knowledge.

This study demonstrates that the EDP initiates knowledge creation through content transmission and exchange, triggers knowledge retention through utilisation of digital technologies and reinforces digitalisation through data value creation. Furthermore, this study enables knowledge transformation as implementation, which contributes to the three pillars of sustainable tourism and facilitates the development of networks encouraging sustainable tourism.

This study identifies approaches that enable economic, social and environmentally sustainable tourism development by facilitating collaborations via digital transformation, digital technologies that guide guest streams, online mobility offers and online environmental awareness campaigns that reduce environmental impacts. Thus, this study strengthens OLT and has implications for organisational learning and tourism policymakers.

While most language departments of the university offer service-learning (SL) subjects based on language teaching, such as “Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Local Schools” and “Serving the Community through Teaching English,” this paper aims to argue that teaching students to teach language(s) is yet to be the best strategy to serve the service recipients.

SL is widely understood as an experiential learning pedagogy that integrates academic focus, reflection and community service and is shown to be impactful. In Hong Kong, the first university that has made SL a graduation requirement is the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University). Considering this, new SL courses have proliferated over the past decade. Adopting a narrative inquiry approach, this paper examines personal narratives from a new SL subject aiming to raise awareness of refugees in Hong Kong. The data includes students’ reflective journals, co-created personal narratives and podcasts and semi-structured interviews.

This paper finds that crafting and recording narratives of shared experiences deepens cultural understanding, cultivates empathy and facilitates language learning in a genuine setting.

Ultimately, this paper advocates a well-designed SL that combines language, content and technology as a powerful, transformational experience for both college students and service recipients.

This paper focuses on a brand new SL course, “Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong,” offered in Semester 1, 2022–2023. The subject was developed by the two authors from a language division affiliated to the University. The deliverables were podcast recordings, co-authored and co-edited by the students and the children.

The use of “homework”, activities outside of the classroom or session, is widely applied in a range of disciplines including teaching, therapy and training. The argument advanced by advocates is that it provides an opportunity to consolidate knowledge learnt in the classroom and develop mastery in an applied environment. However, the use of homework has not been widely discussed or researched within business coaching, which is a form of personal development. This exploratory study aims to examine whether homework, as a coaching intervention, may enhance the clients' learning experience.

Data were collected from eight early career coaches and eight coaching clients. Not all clients were related to the coaches. Each client had experienced a minimum of three coaching sessions. Interviews were recorded and analysed using thematic analysis. The study explored the use of (1) client-led, (2) coach-led and (3) collaboratively developed homework during the engagements.

The findings indicated that homework is widely used and was perceived to have mixed effects. The positioning of the homework by the coach, including the terminology used to describe the activity, and the type of work can affect the level of engagement and thus the perceived value generated.

This is the first study to explore the nature of “homework” in coaching. More work is needed to better inform the use of “homework” in coaching practice, including the type of work and how this is agreed with different types of clients, for example, should homework be coach, collaborative or client led?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how learning solely via an assistance system influences work performance compared with learning with a combination of an assistance system and additional training. While the training literature has widely emphasised the positive role of on-the-job training, particularly for groups that are often underrepresented in formalised learning situations, organisational studies have stressed the risks that emerge when holistic process knowledge is lacking and how this negatively affects work performance. This study aims at testing these negative effects within an experimental design.

This paper uses a laboratory experimental design to investigate how assistance-system-guided learning influences the individuals’ work performance and work satisfaction compared with assistance-system-guided learning combined with theoretical learning of holistic process knowledge. Subjects were divided into two groups and assigned to two different settings. In the first setting, the participants used the assistance systems as an orientation and support tool right at the beginning and learned the production steps exclusively in this way. In the second setting, subjects received an additional 10-min introduction (treatment) at the beginning of the experiment, including detailed information regarding the entire work process.

This study provides evidence that learners provided with prior process knowledge achieve a better understanding of the work process leading to higher levels of productivity, quality and work satisfaction. At the same time, the authors found evidence for differences among workers’ ability to process and apply this additional information. Subjects with lower productivity levels faced more difficulties processing and applying additional process information.

Methodologically, this study goes beyond existing research on assistance systems by using a laboratory experimental design. Though the external validity of this method is limited by the artificial setting, it is a solid way of studying the impact of different usages of digital assistance systems in terms of training. Further research is required, however, including laboratory experiments with larger case numbers, company-level case studies and analyses of survey data, to further confirm the external validity of the findings of this study for the workplace.

This study provides some first evidence that holistic process knowledge, even in low-skill tasks, has an added value for the production process. This study contributes to firms' training policies by exploring new, digitalised ways of guided on-the-job training and demonstrates possible training benefits for people with lower levels of (initial) abilities and motivation.

This study indicates the advantage for companies and societies to invest in additional skills and training and points at the limitations of assistance systems. This paper also contributes to training policies by exploring new, digitalised ways of guided on-the-job training and demonstrates possible training benefits for people with lower levels of (initial) abilities and motivation.

This study extends existing research on digital assistance systems by investigating their role in job-related-training. This paper contributes to labour sociology and organisational research by confirming the importance of holistic process knowledge as opposed to a solely task-oriented digital introduction.

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.

To effectively generate solutions to today's complex challenges, cooperation between governments, industry, civil society and academia is essential. To adequately prepare students for collaboration across academic and non-academic disciplines and stakeholders, Living Labs (LLs), unique research internships have emerged in the educational systems, which are focused on generating insights for society while embedding student learning in both practice and academia. To legitimise the LLs as a method of education in the academic curriculum, it is necessary to evaluate the experience of and potential benefits for students with regard to the development of their academic, professional and personal skills. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the outcomes of participating in LLs from the student's perspective via a case study at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. A secondary aim is to evaluate the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the learning experience of the students.

The authors employed self-reported pre-and post-questionnaires into students' confidence levels with regard to their academic, professional and personal skills. A total of 35 questionnaires were conducted during the period February 2020–July 2021. The authors subsequently applied evaluation research, using a benchmarking approach, to analyse the data.

This study firstly indicates that students are most confident in their personal skills, both before and after conducting the LL, and that they further developed these due to being pushed outside of their growth zone by the various challenges posed during the LL, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondly, while students seem to have become more aware of their professional skills in the LL, this was the aspect on which no improvement was reported after conducting the LL, potentially due to an increased awareness of one's own room for improving professional skills outside of academia. Thirdly, students' reported academic skills improved the most during the LL, which highlights the importance of embedding academic learning both in theory and practice. Lastly, the impact of COVID-19 changed the setting of the LL which led to challenges but also opportunities with respect to research design, time investment and communication.

As LLs seem to contribute to transversal and academic skill development of students, we can legitimise their increasingly common place in higher education curricula. LLs are not only beneficial for stakeholders and society as they generate new insights into societal questions, they are also of added value to students who actively collaborate with the external organisations and researchers. The LLs can thus be seen as a method of education which contributes to students' preparation for future careers, which is one of the main tasks of higher education institutions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the LLs were conducted online, which resulted in disadvantages and advantages. Future LLs can be anticipated on more hybrid or even further online collaborations, which also opens the possibility of collaboration with international organisations located at different parts of the world. In this case, extra attention will need to be devoted to aligning expectations among the different stakeholders and specifically focussing on ways to ensure good communication.

This case-study is one of the first studies that specifically looks at the newly emerging concept of LL research internships and the perception of the student while conducting LLs with societal partners. Previous literature on the topic is scarce and, if existing, has mainly focused on the benefit of the partner organisation or society. Instead, we purposefully reflect on how the collaboration contributes towards students' professional development and employability. By doing so, this paper is one of the first to shed light on the benefits accrued to students’ development by participating in an LL. In addition, as the case study, unexpectedly, took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were also able to evaluate the influence of COVID-19 on the LLs and draw insightful lessons learned for future collaborations with local and international partners in an online setting.