Search

Online education creates new opportunities for learners, which has led to sharply increasing enrollment in the last few years. Despite these benefits, past research shows that the lack of individual interaction with educators creates low learner engagement that leads to high attrition rates, which remains a major challenge in the field. Dynamically scaffolding conversational agents built into online video lectures promise to address this problem by individually interacting with learners, similar to educators' scaffolding behavior. These agents are equipped with recent natural language processing capabilities, creating human-like conversations that help learners to be more engaged in the learning process. To test our hypothesis, we built a dynamically scaffolding conversational agent named Sara and compared it with an often-implemented static conversational agent built into two online video lectures. We deployed a lab experiment with 182 learners. The neurophysiological measurements revealed that Sara significantly improved learner engagement partly explained by differences in learners' perceptions in the way they experienced the interaction. This study connects to already existing conversational agent studies in online education and highlights the importance of including dynamically scaffolding conversational agents in online video lectures to address the problem of low learner engagement in online education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge work organizations are increasingly leveraging automation to enhance and transform their business processes. Many types of automation tools are being deployed in a large variety of information processing tasks, requiring effective management of human-automation co-operation. Yet, conceptual understanding of human-automation hybrid work remains thin and current literature lacks practical recommendations for managers. To address this gap, we synthesize findings from our three earlier case studies with organizations pursuing a wide array of automation tools and examine them through the lens of distributed cognition. We demonstrate how distributed cognition informs about the organizing for human-automation interaction when deploying automation. Our contribution lies in the presentation of six recommendations on three issues: human- automation task allocation, mitigation of the risk of deskilling, and management of collective knowledge across human and automation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have shown the increased importance in Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, especially among large multinational corporations. The European Directive 2014/95/EU requires that so-called 'large public-interest entities' - companies with more than 500 employees - start reporting on their non-financial indicators. However there is a 'significant flexibility' in the disclosure of non-financial information, since no agreed-upon guidelines on CSR reporting exist. As companies are free to report on legally or ethically required issues with no set of standards, opportunities for non-transparency abound and therefore research on CSR measures - existing and new - is needed. Our paper contributes to this line of research by assessing the reported sustainability practices of large Finnish multinational companies by employing a rather novel content analysis tool, the modified Sustainability Evaluation Checklist (SEC), originated from Ameer and Othman, [1]. After modification 52 items, divided into the four sustainability dimensions: the environmental (EI), the ethical (ETI), the diversity (DI), and the community (CI) indices were used to analyse GRI reports from multiple sectors. The study revealed that Finnish multinational companies report relatively comprehensively on environmental issues and the companies have drafted conclusive codes of conduct that cover international as well as internal ethical considerations, at least on some level. As for diversity issues, the role of women in management is generally recognised, yet actual practices related to increasing equality are still few, moreover minorities or the disabled as part of the workforce were not an active concern for most of the businesses. Positive interaction with local communities was generally confined to partnership or minor co-operation with a local school or university, however actual social responsibility practices with or toward local stakeholders were not included in the CI. Testing the suitability of SEC in Finnish context showed its capability of assessing sustainability practices as found in corporate reporting, however revising some index items and adding new ones should be considered. The SEC was found to function on analysing large multinational companies, but its approach is likely unable to assess the practices of smaller businesses with relatively short sustainability-related reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]