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The development of information technologies has led to the rapid evolution of learning approaches and educational solutions, with a focus on active learning. In the context of the transformative learning paradigm, active learning strategies are aligned with student-centered education, enabling learners to engage with complex concepts and practical challenges critically. This chapter presents a semi-structured literature review investigating the adoption of online active learning methods in the context of economics education and its potential to promote transformative learning. The main contribution of this chapter is the development of a framework for integrating online active learning strategies in economics education, grounded in the principles of transformative learning as described by Mezirow. The proposed framework highlights the importance of designing online learning experiences that support critical reflection, dialogue, and self-directed learning and suggests strategies for promoting student engagement and collaboration in the online environment. The impact of this approach on active learning practices in (higher) education is significant, as it provides educators with a roadmap for designing online learning experiences that foster transformative learning and promote student success in the post-pandemic era. The chapter concludes with policy recommendations and future research directions for enhancing the adoption and efficacy of online active learning strategies in economics education.

The purpose of the paper is to show that research on the internet's impact on B2B inter‐firm relations is limited, while findings are anecdotal and sometimes contradictory. This study investigates inter‐firm relations amongst Business Travel Management (BTM) firms and their clients by examining the impact of online BTM solutions on the creation and reinforcement of relational bonds.

The paper shows that two major approaches were combined for examining inter‐firm relations: economic (transaction costs economics) and socio‐psychological (social exchange; inter‐organisation; and industrial network) theories. A model illustrating the interrelations amongst the use of online BTM solutions, two structural (communication, dependence) and two social bonds (trust, satisfaction) was proposed for investigating the impact of online BTM solutions on BTM‐clients relations. Data were gathered from a convenience sample of BTM managers in the UK, Greece, and Cyprus and 194 usable responses were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The paper finds that the impact of online BTM solutions on trust, satisfaction and dependence was not confirmed. However, the hypotheses reflecting the interactions between structural and social bonds were supported, which confirmed the mediating impact of internet‐enabled communication on fostering inter‐firm relations.

In this paper the sample is convenient, while data are gathered only from the buyer‐traveller perspective. Larger scale, cross‐industry studies that also combine buyers' and sellers' perspectives are required.

The paper shows that the internet's ability to foster relational bonds was found to be dependent on its exploitation for enhancing inter‐firm communications. When using the internet for enhancing clients' relations and satisfaction, firms should exploit the internet's communication tools and identify clients' information needs for customising the communications' content.

The paper sees that the internet's impact on forming relational bonds and building B2B relations in the BTM context has not been previously researched.

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that make the adoption of interoperability solutions for online tourism distribution (OTD) more likely by small operators and to develop an evaluation framework for this solutions. Research identifying these determinants is missing. The resulting evaluation framework is then applied to evaluate a number of extant technological solutions focused on interoperability solutions for OTD.

In an attempt to address this gap of research, this paper undertakes a series of interviews and focus groups of the European tourism industry.

Findings partly aligned with the suggestion made by previous research about technology adoption by micro, small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs), they also highlighted some issues which are specific to the adoption of interoperability solutions for OTD. These related to the scarcity of information and communication technology (ICT) applications specifically designed for mini and micro enterprises, the very limited capabilities available for using efficiently ICTs in business-to-business (B2B) operations and the difficulty in collaborating with other companies due to the number of different solutions used in the industry, especially when dealing with large aggregators (global distribution systems (GDSs) or large online travel agencies) and lack of standardization for data.

The study has important theoretical implications. It provides a better understanding of issues affecting the adoption of interoperability solutions for OTD by SMTEs, such as the scarcity of ICT applications specifically designed for mini and micro enterprises, the very limited capabilities available for using ICTs efficiently in B2B operations and lack of standardization.

It facilitates making decisions about adopting interoperability solutions for online distribution solutions, both by suppliers and destination managers.

Limited work has focused on understanding issues affecting the adoption of interoperability solutions for OTD solutions among SMTEs.

This study aims to describe the general picture of the competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly market and discuss how the quality difference may affects the competition between service providers with different quality levels, where both providers offer face-to-face channel and one of providers offers online channel additionally and service quality that consumers have heterogeneous preferences for is vertically differentiated. These results can be used to determine which service providers should offer online expert services and understand the competition in multichannel expert services in duopoly.

This paper uses the stylized vertical differentiation model to investigate the role of quality in expert services market, assuming that two services providers offer the same services with different quality levels and one of them having additional online services. Taking into account the differences of services from products and the particularity of online service, this paper extends the vertical differentiation model to expert services market.

The quality difference is the key factor in the competition of expert services. Service prices and the profits of providers, independent of the quality levels, are positively related to the quality difference, whereas the demand of online services is in the opposite direction regardless of which provider offers online channel. It demonstrates that provider with low-quality level should open online channel from the point of view of social welfare if it is closely related to the expert services, even though any provider can make more profits by opening online channel.

This extended vertical differentiation model, taking into account the importance of vertical differentiation in expert service, ignores the horizontal differentiation. More accurate strategies for multichannel expert services providers with what level of the quality a provider should offer is needed in future work. Moreover, this paper does not consider the different waiting costs of consumers in face-to-face channel and assumes that their problem will be solved eventually.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no study has focused on the quality difference in multichannel expert services market or discussed how to offer online expert services in the duopoly market. This study extends the vertical differentiation model to the multichannel expert service market. Therefore, it fills this research gap and extends research to expert services market in the new network environment, aiming to help understand the competition in multichannel expert services.

The authors explore the outcomes of health-care professionals' participation in a vendor-hosted online community by combining qualitative and quantitative data collected in two separate studies. The authors aim to shed light on the potential value outcomes of community participation covering the reduction of service costs by professionals' community participation.

The authors explore the outcomes of health-care professionals' participation in a vendor-hosted online community by combining qualitative and quantitative data collected in two separate studies. The authors also introduce GABEK® as a unique method of qualitative empirical content analysis. In the quantitative study, the authors refer to customer survey data and transactional data.

The results show that participation in online communities by professionals emerges as a dual concept, consisting of both help-seeking and help-providing behaviors. These behaviors in turn facilitate the creation of economic and relational value, as well as influencing the perceived usefulness of the online community, resulting in higher satisfaction with the community among the participating professionals. Customer survey data and transactional data were gathered from a major medical equipment vendor hosting an online community, and those data confirm that participation also decreases service support costs to professionals by reducing the number of necessary service visits by the vendor's service technicians.

The resulting model of participation and corresponding benefits in an online community for health-care professionals reflects and informs current developments in the health care industry.

The combination of qualitative as well as quantitative studies relying on the data of a world leading medical equipment vendor hosting an online community provides unique and innovative insights into participation and value creation within B2B communities.

This chapter explores the contribution of The Open University (OU) Library to influencing curriculum decisions about embedding digital and information literacies in an online environment. Recommendations can be applied to higher education (HE) institutions as they develop permanent e-learning strategies to prepare for a long-term solution to online learning experiences. Learning providers are creating strategies for online content creation, student engagement, and skills development. It is an opportunity to demonstrate their value by making an effective transition to online learning, streamlining services to create student-centered experiences.

It investigates existing e-pedagogical approaches developed pre- and during the COVID-19 pandemic to embedding digital literacies in practice, drawing on the OU’s experience of developing effective frameworks for online teaching programs. The aim is to review institutional preparedness for effective transition, so that staff members and students can adapt to post-COVID realities. This draws upon student-centered, holistic design of programs to embed accessible and inclusive processes in distance learning, utilizing technological solutions to create optimal teaching and learning environments.

It will also make recommendations about how embedding digital literacies within the curriculum will equip graduates for post-education experiences within working and social contexts, by building activities into module that develop digital capabilities. For effective learning experiences to take place, institutions require development of born-digital support material to develop staff confidence and ability to produce effective, accessible online learning objects. As more organizations move to online, hybrid, and flipped learning interventions, high-level university strategy can future-proof learning design by developing the support that staff need to provide the best experiences for their learners.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe in March 2020, higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide were confronted with creating online courses to complete the semester. While emphasizing positive elements such as flexibility and innovative solutions, the literature focused on numerous faculty problems such as online fatigue, emotional well-being and stress. This paper aims to explore faculty perceptions of teaching during the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two surveys, in the first week and at the end of the semester, were conducted at a business school in Switzerland via the program Lima. A total of 19 faculty members participated in the survey. Of the participants, 56.7% responded in the first survey and 70.9% responded in the second.

The findings revealed that the faculty’s impressions of their online courses remained positive. The most significant issue cited was time. According to faculty estimations, more than ten additional hours per week were spent preparing for online courses. Nonetheless, many faculty members reported interest in continuing online practices in their future courses.

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed HEIs to embrace the digital revolution while teaching in a competence-oriented mode. However, moving forward, HEIs must mitigate the long-term effects by careful planning and evaluating their digital readiness as an institution and offering training for their faculty and students when necessary.

The study contributes to the existing literature by analyzing one stakeholder group, i.e. faculty members, and their perceptions of teaching during a worldwide pandemic.

To improve the academic integrity of online examinations, digital proctoring systems have recently been implemented in higher education institutions (HEIs). The paper aims to understand how digital proctoring has been practised in higher education (HE) and proposes future research directions for studying digital proctoring in HE.

A systematic literature review was conducted. The PRISMA procedure was adapted for the literature search. The topics were identified by topic modelling techniques from 154 relevant publications in seven databases.

Seven widely discussed topics in literature were identified, including solutions for detecting cheating and student authentication, challenges/issues of uptakes and students' performance in different proctoring environments.

This paper provides insights for academics, policymakers, practitioners and students to understand the implementation of digital proctoring in academia, its adoption by HEIs, impacts on students' and educators' performance and the rapid increase in its use for digital exams in HEIs, with particular emphasis on the impacts of the systems on digitalising examinations in HE.

This review paper has systematically and critically described the state-of-the-art literature on digital proctoring in HE and provides useful insights and implications for future research on digital proctoring, and how academic integrity in online examinations can be enhanced, along with digitalising HE.

This research aims to scrutinize the negative reviews regarding the 5-star chain hotels and the e-responses on TripAdvisor, to categorize the complaints declared in the review texts, to provide better understanding of the online problem-solving methods of hotels and their corporate approach to e-complaints and to reveal the post-vacation electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) behaviours of the complaining tourists.

Within the scope of this research, 404 negative reviews and 364 e-responses are subject to an extensive content analysis. A total of 1,655 tourist e-complaints which were mentioned in the negative online reviews are categorized according to their subject matters and grouped under main themes. The e-responses of hotels and statements of e-complaining tourists regarding post-vacation experience are analysed in detail based on a qualitative research approach.

As a result of the research, 82 sub-themes within 11 complaint categories are determined, and it is found out that the e-complaints mainly focus on “food and beverage services”, “room comfort” and “hotel staff”. The hotel management mainly implemented problem-solving strategies such as “request for future patronage, a recovery plan as a result of the detailed analysis of the problem and warning to the relevant department performing poor service” as well as giving unsatisfactory “cliché responses”. Dissatisfied tourists performed negative e-WOM behaviours by using abusing expressions in review text, recommending different hotel alternatives, failing to recommend the hotel and expressing that they would not return.

Combing through negative e-reviews which include wide range of complaints of disappointed tourists and the statements which reveal post-vacation tendencies and feelings, the e-responses of hotels that are providing insight regarding the corporate approach to negative feedbacks and formation of post-vacation relations between the hotel and customers, the paper adopts a qualitative and utilitarian approach. The originality of the paper stems from its elaborative context analysis and balanced comparison of three 5-star luxury chain resort hotels located on the shores of the Mediterranean with almost similar quality standards and guest relations/public relations (GR/PR) departments that represent corporate identity. To this respect, the research is thought to be original in quality and can fill out the gap in the tourism literature. Presenting conceptual framework and practical information, the paper is predicted to guide the future studies, tourism marketers, travel consultants, PR/GR staff and managers employed in hospitality businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to design a multifingered dexterous hand grasping planning method that can efficiently perform grasping tasks on multiple dexterous hand platforms.

The grasping process is divided into two stages: offline and online. In the offline stage, the grasping solution form is improved based on the forward kinematic model of the dexterous hand. A comprehensive evaluation method of grasping quality is designed to obtain the optimal grasping solution offline data set. In the online stage, a safe and efficient selection strategy of the optimal grasping solution is proposed, which can quickly obtain the optimal grasping solution without collision.

The experiments verified that the method can be applied to different multifingered dexterous hands, and the average grasping success rate for objects with different structures is 91.7%, indicating a good grasping effect.

Using a forward kinematic model to generate initial grasping points can improve the generality of grasping planning methods and the quality of initial grasping solutions. The offline data set of optimized grasping solutions can be generated faster by the comprehensive evaluation method of grasping quality. Through the simple and fast obstacle avoidance strategy, the safe optimal grasping solution can be quickly obtained when performing a grasping task. The proposed method can be applied to automatic assembly scenarios where the end effector is a multifingered dexterous hand, which provides a technical solution for the promotion of multifingered dexterous hands in industrial scenarios.