The Form of Content Personalisation at Mainstream,Transatlantic News Outlets: 2010–2016

ABSTRACT

In October 2016 the New York Times announced new content personalisation features for its websites and mobile apps, with the promise of “much more to come”. This article examines such developments via a quantitative content analysis of personalisation features at 15 major news outlets in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany and via interviews with senior editorial staff at some of those outlets. Both websites and mobile apps were studied, allowing comparisons to be made across platforms as well as geographically. Longitudinal comparisons were also made against an equivalent survey conducted in 2010. The results reveal significant changes over the last six years with, for example, rises in personalisation on mobile platforms, falls in the use of recommendations by friends, and convergence and commodification in content recommendation platforms. This study provides evidence to support continued debates on classical concerns such as selective exposure, but also raises new concerns about the effects of personalisation, including data protection and security issues.     

Teaching customer-centric operations management – evidence from an experiential learning-oriented mass customisation class

The increase of individualised customer demands and tough competition in the manufacturing sector gave rise to more customer-centric operations management such as products and services (mass) customisation. Mass customisation (MC), which inherits the ‘economy of scale’ from mass production (MP), aims to meet specific customer demands with near MP efficiency. Such an overarching concept has multiple impacts on operations management. This requires highly qualified and multi-skilled engineers who are well prepared for managing MC. Therefore, this concept should be properly addressed by engineering education curricula which needs to keep up with the emerging business trends. This paper introduces a novel course about MC and variety in operations management which recalls several Experiential Learning (EL) practices consistently with the principle of an active learning. The paper aims to analyse to which extent EL can improve the efficiency of the teaching methods and the retention rate in the context of operations management. The proposed course is given to engineering students whose’ perceptions are collected using semi-structured questionnaires and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The paper highlights the relevance (i) of teaching MC, and (ii) of active learning in engineering education, through the specific application in the domain of MC.     

Lifelong learning: Implications for institutions

Lifelong learning poses a large number ofthreats and opportunities for the traditionalhigher education institutions. Not justprogramme offerings and means of delivery willhave to be restructured, but, morefundamentally, universities and colleges willhave to rethink and reshape their businessconcept, that is: their way of creating valueand maintaining their competitive edge overother providers in the education system.It will be argued that a business concept thatis based on the idea of creating value throughenhancing differentiation requires highereducation providers to move as much as they canto a student-centered provision of educationand training. This has far-reachingconsequences for the curriculum, the concept ofresearch, the interaction with students, andthe relationships with other institutions inthe education system. It may very well lead toan education system in which there is room forsome universities to transform themselves intodual-sector institutions, that contain both ahigher education part and a vocational part.