An Empirical Research on Study Success in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic – a Case Study

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures to contain it pushed many universities to switch to online learning in the spring of 2020. The changes took place very quickly and it became clear that the long-term consequences of such a transformation are uncertain and require more detailed study. This research attempts to analyze the impact of online learning on study success. This research makes use of a triangulation with quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitatively, it contains path diagram with various factors that have an impact on the study success at a German university, which is based on a quantitative online survey with 1.529 participants. Qualitatively, 49 interviews were analyzed in order to identify reasons for the risk of failing to achieve study success. The relevance of technology becomes evident in the quantitative analysis, as it manifests itself in almost all categories that affect study success. Moreover, a new influencing factor appeared, the “adaption to digital teaching”, which was often considered important qualitatively.

Open Innovation Process for Inter-Organizational Projects

Open Innovation (OI) research has covered various organizational forms in dimensions of durability (permanent versus temporary organizing) and organizational scope (intra- or inter-organizational). Inter-organizational forms - both temporary and permanent – are regarded mainly as modes of OI. However, these organizational forms also act as initiators of OI activities to extend knowledge transfer across the inter-organizational consortium borders, which is hardly researched. To address this gap, the research presented in this article develops an OI process for inter-organizational projects (IOP) as initiators of OI. The initial model is developed by action research with an IOP of museums and educational institutions implementing a series of hackathons. The model’s applicability is then evaluated for other IOPs by a survey, indicating the model’s suitability for practitioners. Findings point to the importance of collaborative activities for aligning the OI initiative with both individual partners’ and common project goals, while outbound activities are regarded least important despite the time-limitation of the project. The research is limited by its focus on the specific IOP environment of EU-funded projects and the small scope of the survey.

Monitoring Services to Support Continuous Curriculum Engineering

Continuous and rapid developments in science and technology have raised a challenge for compliance between the learning content provided by study programs and (1) the actual state of art in the domains the programs are addressing and (2) the actual needs of companies that will employ the graduates of these programs. To achieve such compliance continuously, the digitalization of learning content (curriculum) engineering could provide supporting tools that facilitate awareness of incompliance, which is the first step in introducing changes in the learning content. In this article we discuss how such awareness, regarding the needs of companies, can be supported by a service system that monitors the gap between educational demand and offer. The proposed service system provides possibilities for automatic, semi-automatic and manual analysis of texts representing the educational demand, versus the texts representing the educational offer. The implementation of the service system has been demonstrated, having been applied at university. The experiments showed that the system can provide valuable information for educational content development, but its maintenance and incorporation in study process management and curriculum engineering still require additional research.

Virtual Prototyping: Evaluating the Digital Twin Based Virtual Factory for New Product Introduction

Shortening lifecycles and increasing complexity make product and production lifecycle processes more challenging than ever for manufacturing enterprises. Virtual Prototyping (VP) technologies promise a viable solution to handle such challenges in reducing time and physical builds as well as increasing quality. In previous studies, the Digital Twin (DT) based Virtual Factory (VF) concept showed significant potential to handle co-evolution by integrating 3D factory and product models with immersive and interactive 3D Virtual Reality (VR) simulation technology as well as real-time bidirectional data synchronisation between virtual and physical production systems. In this article, we present an extension to the paper “Demonstrating and Evaluating the Digital Twin Based Virtual Factory for Virtual Prototyping” presented at CARV2021. The study presents an evaluation by industry experts of the DT based VF concept for VP in the context of New Product Introduction (NPI) processes. The concept is demonstrated in two cases: wind turbine blade manufacturing and nacelle assembly operations at Vestas Wind Systems A/S. The study shows that the VF provides an immersive virtual environment, which allows the users to reduce the time needed for prototyping. The industry experts propose several business cases for the introduced solution and find that the phases that would have the most gain are the later ones (production) where the product design is more mature.

Selected Topics on Advanced Methods in Complex Systems Research: Editorial Introduction to Issue 28 of CSIMQ

The articles, which have been recommended by reviewers for this issue of CSIMQ, present contributions in evaluation of application of the advanced means for evaluation, monitoring and modification of complex systems and similar content mobile applications. The focus of the presented articles is on the adaptation of the above-described means for new contexts and challenges.

Quality Assurance in Big Data Engineering - A Metareview

With a continuously increasing amount and complexity of data being produced and captured, traditional ways of dealing with their storing, processing, analysis and presentation are no longer sufficient, which has led to the emergence of the concept of big data. However, not only the implementation of the corresponding applications is a challenging task, but also the proper quality assurance. To facilitate the latter, in this publication, a comprehensive structured literature metareview on the topic of big data quality assurance is presented. The results will provide interested researchers and practitioners with a solid foundation for their own quality assurance related endeavors and therefore help in advancing the cause of quality assurance in big data as well as the domain of big data in general. Furthermore, based on the findings of the review, worthwhile directions for future research were identified, providing prospective authors with some guidance in this complex environment.

Development and Demonstrational Instantiation of a Method for the Structured Content Analysis of Smartphone Apps

The publication discusses the adaptation of dedicated known methods for structured content analysis for the usage of smartphone apps, taking into account the specifics of these dynamic media types and resulting consequences for the procedure and content rating. The background is the increasing popularity of apps and the growing demand for precise analysis of the status quo regarding the content and functions of apps on the market, esp. within design-oriented business informatics. Within the literature, no uniform, comparable and systematic approach to this could be identified so far. Therefore, an existing standard for the evaluation of apps from the medical context has been adapted for general application to apps. This provides a helpful procedure for researchers, practitioners, and students and ensures consistency across studies. The feasibility of the proposed method and assessment standard were confirmed by a successful demonstrational instantiation based on an app review of energy information systems for private customers.

Applicability of Blockchain Technology in Securities Settlement

Technological advancements are often adopted to financial markets to improve their operations and safety. Blockchain technology has been recognized as one of the potential technologies to be utilized in capital markets. The goal of this article is to evaluate the applicability of using the blockchain technology in securities settlement process. First, the theoretical background of blockchain technology is reviewed and the current financial market infrastructure is examined. Then Central Securities Depositories Regulation and the current securities settlement processes are examined. Blockchain applicability framework designed by Gourisetti, Mylrea and Patangia is applied to assess the blockchain technology’s applicability to securities settlement. The results suggest that blockchain technology can be applied to securities settlement, and the used blockchain type should be a private blockchain with Proof-of-Authority consensus mechanism. A blockchain architecture model, based on a model provided by Zhuang, Chen, Shae and Shyu, and potential node structure for securities settlement are developed, taking into account the existing literature on blockchain technology, financial markets, and Central Securities Depositories Regulation. The proposed blockchain architecture model and node structure are then evaluated against scholar expected benefits and drawbacks of using blockchain for securities settlement and cross-border settlement efficiency. The evaluation reveals that the proposed blockchain technology model can potentially improve some of the current securities settlement issues, such as costly reconciliation and difficult cross-border securities settlement. At the same time, using blockchain technology in securities settlement would be challenging because the practical implementation time would be long and would require market-wide commitment. The main artefacts of this article are the proposed blockchain architecture model and node structure that would allow securities settlement processes to be executed using blockchain technology.