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1 – 8 of 8Andreas Alexiou, Michaéla C. Schippers, Ilan Oshri and Spyros Angelopoulos
This study uses a critically acclaimed digital game as an instructional tool to explore the role of emotional design elements on psychological flow and perceived learning.
Abstract
Purpose
This study uses a critically acclaimed digital game as an instructional tool to explore the role of emotional design elements on psychological flow and perceived learning.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors employ transportation theory to generate a set of antecedents of psychological flow and the theory of flow to connect the gaming experience to positive learning outcomes. The authors investigate the subjective learning experience of players with the use of a psychometric survey, and the authors employ structural equation modelling (SEM) to unearth the direct as well as the indirect effects amongst narrative, aesthetics, flow and learning outcomes.
Findings
The findings of this study demonstrate that narrative and aesthetics in serious games positively influence the perceived learning by facilitating a state of psychological flow.
Research limitations/implications
This study contributes to better understanding and theorizing the role of narrative and aesthetics on learning outcomes in the context of serious games.
Practical implications
The findings of this study bear valuable implications for the design of serious games as they highlight the importance of elements often disregarded as not directly related to the learning process and are typically absent from the design of serious games.
Originality/value
Prior studies have identified aesthetics and narratives as design elements that contribute to the perceived enjoyment of a game; this study empirically investigates the role of narratives and aesthetics in enhancing perceived learning through psychological flow.
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Mauro Caselli, Andrea Fracasso, Arianna Marcolin and Sergio Scicchitano
This work analyses how the adoption of technological innovations correlates with workers' perceived levels of job insecurity, and what factors moderate such relationship.
Abstract
Purpose
This work analyses how the adoption of technological innovations correlates with workers' perceived levels of job insecurity, and what factors moderate such relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
The study makes use of the 2018 wave of the Participation, Labour, Unemployment Survey (PLUS) from Inapp. The richness of the survey and the representativeness of the underlying sample (including 13,837 employed workers) allow employing various empirical specifications where it is possible to control and moderate for many socio-demographic features of the worker, including her occupation and industry of employment, thereby accounting for various potential confounding factors.
Findings
The results of this ordered logit estimations show that workers' perception of job insecurity is affected by many subjective, firm-related and even macroeconomic factors. This study demonstrates that the adoption of technological innovations by companies is associated with lower levels of job insecurity perceived by their workers. In fact, the adoption of technological innovations by a company is perceived by surviving workers (those who remain in the same firm even after the introduction of such innovations) as a signal of the firm's health and its commitment to preserving the activity. Individual- and occupation-specific moderating factors play a limited role.
Originality/value
This study estimates how perceived job insecurity relates to the technological innovations adopted by the firms in which the interviewees are employed rather than analyzing their general concerns about job insecurity. In addition, this study identifies different types of innovations, such as product and process innovation, automation and other types of innovations.
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How to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality…
Abstract
Purpose
How to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality flaws. This paper tries to fill this gap with an alternative approach.
Design/methodology/approach
The content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo were first used to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 15 journals. Second, the publishers' websites were scraped to fetch their portfolios and, thus, their “true” journal counts.
Findings
The outcome is a list of the 100 largest publishers comprising 28.060 scholarly journals, with the largest publishing 3.763 journals, and the smallest carrying 76 titles. The usual “oligopoly” of major publishing companies leads the list, but it also contains 17 university presses from the Global South, and, surprisingly, 30 predatory publishers that together publish 4.517 journals.
Research limitations/implications
Additional data sources could be used to mitigate remaining biases; it is difficult to disambiguate publisher names and their imprints; and the dataset carries a non-uniform distribution, thus risking the omission of data points in the lower range.
Practical implications
The dataset can serve as a useful basis for comprehensive meta-scientific surveys on the publisher-level.
Originality/value
The catalogue can be deemed more inclusive and diverse than other ones because many of the publishers would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. The list is freely accessible and invites regular updates. The approach used here (webscraping) has seldomly been used in meta-scientific surveys.
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Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras and Haifa Jamal Al-Lail
Institutions, including higher education institutions (HEIs), may use crises as an opportunity to develop, to transform and to improve their institutional resilience. Indeed, the…
Abstract
Institutions, including higher education institutions (HEIs), may use crises as an opportunity to develop, to transform and to improve their institutional resilience. Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic proves that a vast majority of HEIs around the world effectively adapted to the circumstances of the pandemic and successfully embarked on remote learning. The analysis of HEIs proves as well that the nearly overnight switch to remote learning was but one aspect of the quiet transformation that HEIs worldwide were subdued to. In this context, this chapter identifies the administrative practices, including talent management, operations management, and above all, the organizational culture. The notion of changed expectations on the part of the faculty and the students is highlighted. The key point that this chapter makes is that the faculty and the art of education, rather than simply teaching, need to be placed first if HEIs are to retain their resilience.
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Kyriakos Drivas and Andreas Panagopoulos
The authors argue that the patent term change introduced in Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the USA inadvertently offered a metric of…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors argue that the patent term change introduced in Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the USA inadvertently offered a metric of self-valuation of patents at the time of filing, affirming the ability of Drugs and Chemical patents to offer greater R&D incentives than other technology fields. As renewals also offer a metric of self-valuation, the authors find that upon renewal Computer patents are found to offer greater R&D incentives than Drugs and Chemicals. The purpose of this paper is to inquire as to why Computer patents are considered as more valuable in the post grant period, even though they were not considered as valuable upon filing. The authors advance the idea that patents can increase in value if encompassed in a patent portfolio.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors employ the introduction of the TRIPS agreement in the USA. In order to facilitate the move to TRIPS, the USPTO (unexpectedly) allowed applicants who filed prior to June 8, 1995 a patent length that was equal to the maximum of two regimes. Therefore, applicants that filed before the deadline were given a possible small extension of their patent’s time length. The authors use this change and renewal data to infer firms’ self-valuation of patents. For this reason, the authors acquire information for all utility patents that were filed around June 8, 1995 data project.
Findings
The authors offer an additional explanation that is related to the increasingly commonplace build up of patent portfolios: patents can increase in value if encompassed in a portfolio. Such portfolios are bundles of patents whose means to an end lays in their strength in numbers. As Lanjouw and Schankerman (2004) note, when a patent is added to a portfolio the cost of defending a technology against infringement allegations decreases. To rephrase, a patent is regarded as the additional foot-soldier who aids the firm, arm-in-arm, in defending its technological territory and in fulfilling its strategic goal.
Originality/value
The originality stemming from the paper is that policy makers that aim to tackle patent proliferation should not focus their attention to individual patents. Instead, they should target policies toward patent portfolios, because they provide the means of endowing patents with the extra weight that makes filing and renewing irrelevant patents worthwhile.
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