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Purpose: This paper aims to critically evaluate the evolution of Assurance of Learning (AoL) in business education and identify gaps and responsibilities in higher institution landscapes moving into the future. This comes amidst increasing structural reforms, an increasingly digitalised world, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and wider scrutiny of graduate competencies for job readiness. Design/Methodology/Approach: A systematic literature review comprising 27 journal articles published between 2018 and 2022 is the methodology used in this research. This approach is justified as it provides a recent synopsis of current trends on AoL and encompasses the changes over the course of the COVID-19-induced higher education landscapes. Findings: The systematic literature review revealed a strong flavour for AoL measurement through the students' perspectives, with little emerging from faculty insights. Only six out of the 27 articles were framed in a non-English speaking background, revealing that most studies were still concentrated in a US or English environment. Also, while papers on AoL have increased in numbers from 2018 to 2022, there remains scant literature on AoL measurements related to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent digital technologies, and how these would have changed given the rapid shift to online or hybrid environments. Originality/Value: A comprehensive review of AoL literature from 2018 to 2022 is undertaken through Leximancer, which reveals conceptual and relational ties between core themes and concepts of interest. The findings inform business school leaders of the current state of AoL processes, by combining the views of students, faculty and managers.

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COVID-19 has flipped traditional face-to-face exchanges. This quickly prompted involuntary changes that required appropriate pedagogical strategies suited to online courses. This study explored the experiences, interactions, and social presence (SP) of participants involved in the 2020 spring term postgraduate program in a Taiwanese university. Through the interviews with instructors and students, SP was analyzed in terms of affective association, community cohesion, instructor involvement, and interaction intensity. Results showed that SP was perceived favorably by students while teachers have attempted to enhance the learning environment by augmenting the SP indicators. This study advances the understanding that despite having low perceptions on community cohesiveness and interaction intensity, there is some emerging evidence to suggest that SP has been observed by learners even under the pressures and limitations imposed by COVID-19 on HEIs. Theoretical and practical contributions are provided to assist universities navigating their way out of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finally, all participants stated their intentions to revisit Iran as a medical tourism destination post COVID-19, with the vast majority keen to undergo medical tourism once the COVID-19 pandemic is controlled. While the tourism industry has faced numerous crises in the past, few studies have explored if medical tourism can be a strategy for post-crisis destination recovery. The unfolding COVID-19 crisis has severely impacted the tourism industry through a combination of business and health regulations (Ayittey et al., [2]). [Extracted from the article]

Hotel quarantine has been a prevalent process over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic as destinations seek to utilise such spaces to uncover potential positive cases within international tourism mobility. Yet, this abruptly designed layer of quarantine is vastly different to what hotels were built for and intended as spaces of leisure and hospitality. In addition, the spaces of immobility and how these are encountered by guests in quarantine are largely under-investigated. Addressing existing knowledge gaps, 15 blogs written from hotel quarantine guests were analysed through the work of Scheiner's spaces of immobility to examine how they negotiated with these spaces. The research revealed three dominant themes of food, health and wellbeing, the digital self, and assurances as key markers of immobility. These outcomes provide theoretical and managerial implications to reconsider urban tourism politics within cities in terms of hotel design and spatiality in the future. • Investigates urban tourism (im)mobilities from the spaces of hotel quarantine • Extends mobility biographies through the lens of 15 hotel quarantine blogs • Identifies four spaces of (im)mobilities in food, health and wellbeing, the digital self, and assurances • Conceptualizes a framework of hotel quarantine immobilities [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the notion of external referencing has been undertaken across a range of disciplines, its adoption in a tourism setting remains largely fragmented. This project applies a 'floating classroom' as part of a virtual Community of Practice (CoP) to enable tourism policy and planning educators to perform a benchmarking exercise for maintaining teaching quality despite geographical separation and social distancing mandates. Virtual CoPs can help maintain teaching quality at a time when universities are increasingly required to uphold international standards of excellence and as the coronavirus continues to make face-to-face interactions risky. The CoP enabled mutual support and knowledge sharing for the design of teaching approaches, materials, and authentic assessments. The paper was limited to three educators teaching similar courses in Anglophone institutions and reports the results of a one-off study. But findings will assist educators interested in maintaining or enhancing teaching quality over the course of the pandemic and post-COVID-19 futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the major tourism-related cryptocurrencies is investigated. More precisely, the variable lag causality is used, to test whether data related to the pandemic and more precisely, confirmed cases and lockdown stringency index, cause the cryptocurrencies from the field of tourism. Then, a possible long-run relationship is tested, employing the multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis, and finally, a time-varying regression model through a Bayesian framework is structured. According to the results, the COVID-19 pandemic had a diverse impact, of different magnitude, on the tourism-related cryptocurrencies for the years of the pandemic examined. This paper is the first to examine the impact of the pandemic on tourism, through the financial performance of the relevant cryptocurrencies related to this sector, also comparing the various years of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As COVID-19 pandemic has left great consequences on all economic activities, social media has served as a vastly helpful communication tool for most industries, including tourism. The spa destinations are trying to attract tourists by changing the way of using social media while adapting to the new situation. The aim of this paper is to analyze the social media used in the promotion of spa tourism. The authors compare two different phases: pre-COVID-19 and during COVID-19 using data collected from 126owners of tourist accommodation in spas destination. The research showed that during the period of COVID-19, the respondents most often use Instagram and Booking, they post the content most often once a week using photos and text. In addition, the results show that the respondents emphasize the location and price (in the pre-COVID-19), but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they put importance on health safety andcleanliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]