International brand alliances and co-branding: antecedents of cognitive dissonance and student satisfaction with co-branded higher education programs

The study investigates how in international partnerships the brand credibility of each partner, student-institution identification with each partner, and perceived service quality relate to student satisfaction. A structured survey questionnaire was completed by 528 students taking a co-branded higher education program in Hong Kong or Sri Lanka. The results indicate that the brand credibility of a foreign institution is a stronger influencer on student identification with the foreign institution as compared to the relationship between credibility and identification with the local partner. The negative relationship between organizational identification and cognitive dissonance for each institution in the partnership is also stronger for the foreign institution. As the popularity of international partnerships and co-branded higher education programs continues to grow, the importance and dominance of foreign brand credibility and student identification with foreign institutions is recognized.     

Exploring the role of a government authority in managing transformation in service re-engineering – Experiences from Dubai police

E-Government adoption and implementation has gained noticeable momentum across many developed and developing economies. Nevertheless, transitioning from the “electronic” to the stage of “transformational” domain – coined as t-Government – is posing the greatest challenge of how government services respond to changes in the broader economy and society. Despite considerable investments and the wide use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), research literature on e-Government suggests that government services have yet to reach the full potential of seamless integration, where all transactions are completed electronically. Through a detailed analysis of the extant e-Government literature and a case study based empirical research, this paper explores the domain of e-Government in identifying the possible reasons for this potential shortfall in achieving full integration. Furthermore, the paper intends to highlight an aspect of complexity surrounding crossing the integration gap as the authors denote by “eChasm” in the e-Government conceptual model that leads to transformation. In addition, it focuses on radical change through Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and the call for strategic style of leadership, for cross-agency collaboration leading to a successful realisation of transformational government (t-Government). It is interesting to note that researchers and public sector leaders have started to realise that implementing and managing the transformation of public services, copiously satisfying the users and stakeholders, is a task of multi-dimensional complexity.     

Investigating importance and key factors for information governance implementation in Nigerian Universities

Education and Information Technologies - Information governance (IG) embraces underlying necessities to organize information using consistent method for meeting organizational needs. This demand...     

Swayed by the logo and name: does university branding work?

Over the last decade, many universities attempted to improve their public image by changing their corporate visual identity (CVI) and/or name. Despite the prevalence of such practices, little research has been conducted into their effectiveness. The research reported here focused upon one facet of the higher education branding debate, that of the effectiveness of CVI in influencing observers' perceptions of a university and, by association, its lecturers. A secondary question concerned the name. Photographs of two lecturers (M/F) were placed into controlled digital simulations of a university foyer featuring systematically varied CVI and name. Using a range of measures and a large-sample Internet survey of n?=?888, we found that CVI and name affected respondents' perceptions of university lecturers. However, the enhancement was exclusively upon perceptions of the male lecturer, and strongly favored traditional, heraldic CVI, with a secondary naming effect.     

Establishment of engineering laboratories for undergraduate and postgraduate studies

The importance of the laboratories for the study of engineering problems is manifold. At the undergraduate level it provides an opportunity for the students to get an impression of the basic principles of engineering. At the postgraduate level it becomes an instrument for advanced level study and for the solutions to real-life engineering problems. Level of emphasis by an individual engineering institution on basic engineering, interdisciplinary aspects of engineering and relevance to international, national and local industrial trends effects the policy to establish the engineering laboratories. However, a core facility, for the teaching of the most basic principals of relevant field of engineering should be a common feature of all the laboratories associated with individual subject area. In this research paper an approach for establishing engineering laboratories is presented. It discusses the relation between the syllabus of appropriate level of study and the equipment required in the laboratory, physical planning for the laboratory, sequential and parallel approaches for establishing the laboratories, the functional capacity of laboratories, the organizational flexibility of the laboratories, the cost factor and the recurring expenditure. It suggests ways of utilizing the laboratory for effective teaching and research through optimal use of the above factors.     

Effect of seedling age and water depth on morphological and physiological aspects of transplanted rice under high temperature

INTRODUCTION Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most im-portant crops in Pakistan. It is the third largest crop interms of area and production after wheat and cotton.Although rice in Pakistan is consuming large acreage,Pakistan is still far behind other rice producingcountries. The average yield is very low (2 t/ha) ascompared to Egypt (8.4 t/ha) and USA (6.6 t/ha).There are many reasons for this low yield. The mostimportant are high temperature (40?50 °C), low hu-midity at …     

A Study of the Causes of User Dissatisfaction in Academic Libraries: A Case of University Students in a Developing Country

ABSTRACT

This article investigates students’ perceptions and expectations of service quality to understand the causes of dissatisfaction with the services delivered by the university libraries in Bangladesh. A total of 623 usable responses were collected from ten public and private university libraries in the country. The survey data were collected using a modified five dimensional SERVQUAL-based questionnaire, consisting of 26 service items. To determine the level of user satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the service items, the study used the disconfirmation theory with slight modification. It was found that users’ unrealistically high expectation for quality services is one of the key sources of their dissatisfaction. The other causes of dissatisfaction include lack of user-employee relationships, lack of attention to users’ needs, an external communication gap between library and users, lack of attention to enhance staffs’ performance, etc. Based on the service deficiencies identified, the study offers some measures that could be used as a way to improve service quality, and thereby user satisfaction.     

Mining movies for song sequences with video based music genre identification system

Musical sequences with actors dancing and lip-synching to songs sung by playback singers are integral parts, particularly of South Asian movies. Fans seek out movies for their songs and they often seek songs of a particular genre. In fact, song and dance sequence of South Asian movies are an industry of their own. Given the huge numbers of movies produced in South Asia over the past decades, most of which are in digital archives, it is an important problem to automatically extract and categorise their musical sequences. This paper proposes a system for musical sequences extraction from movies. Our method invokes an SVM-based classifier and makes as well a novel application of probabilistic timed automaton to distinguish musical sequences from non-musical. Our system analyses both audio and video signals to give a classifier that not only extracts musical sequences from movies but identifies their genre. We achieved a recall of 93.24% with precision of 87.34% in song extraction when applied on 10 popular Bollywood movies. An accuracy of 89.5% has been achieved on Bollywood song genre identification.     

Variations in perceptions of the learning environment and approaches to studying among university students in Pakistan

In Western countries, university students adopt various approaches to studying depending on how they perceive their learning environment. Their perceptions and approaches are related to demographic and contextual factors such as age, subject of study, gender, and year of study. This study looked for similar relationships in Pakistani students. A survey, administered to 494 male and 418 female undergraduates in four subject areas across four years of study at two universities in Pakistan, addressed their perceptions of the learning environment, learning preferences, motivation, and approaches to studying. Consistent with Western research, students in the arts and social sciences perceived their programmes more positively and were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, compared to students in science and technology or business and management. Contrary to Western research, students’ perceptions of their learning environment varied with age and year of study, but their approaches to studying did not. Gender differences were found in their perceptions and motivation. These variations appear to be specific to the context of Pakistan.