Josep-Maria Batalla-Busquets

This paper examines the influence that student perceived quality of service (PSQ) has on continuance intention and willingness to recommend a course in a fully online university. A holistic view of the service provided by the university is taken. It is not only the effect of the teaching which is examined, but also that of the administrative services, the additional services, and the virtual learning environment (user interface). Through a survey completed by 1,870 students and the subsequent analysis using structural equations, we found that each of these services has a significant impact on the students' PSQ, their level of satisfaction, and, as a result, their loyalty and willingness to recommend the university. The study found that the perceived quality of the administrative services can have a comparatively higher impact on student satisfaction than the other services. PSQ is shown to have also a direct impact on student loyalty and recommendations. Moreover, as a whole, non-teaching services have a greater impact on loyalty and willingness to recommend than teaching service.The peculiarities of the process of providing educational services in a virtual environment (such as the absence of face-to-face interaction between student and teacher and the lack of conventional tangible elements which act as benchmarks for quality of service) are well-known. The relationship established in the literature between the constructs of service quality, satisfaction, loyalty, and willingness to recommend the service in an offline environment can also be seen in this context.The interconnection of factors proves to be more complex and interrelated than has been accounted for as yet in the scholarly literature. The findings of the survey are relevant to system concerns related to quality management and sustainability, both of which are increasingly important in today’s competitive educational postsecondary environment.

Purpose: Functionality of feedback in pedagogical processes has been broadly analyzed in face-to-face learning, although to a lesser extent than in the on-line learning. Narciss (2004, 2008) distinguishes two dimensions within the feedback, the semantic dimension and the structural dimension. This article aims to analyze, from the student’s perspective, the semantic dimension of feedback in a virtual learning environment (VLE). Firstly, we analyze the importance that VLE students give to feedback and its degree of personalization. Later, the usefulness that students deem feedback should have, paying special attention to each of its semantic subdimensions (Narciss, 2004). Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted among students of Business Administration degree of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). 182 students took part, separated into two groups (pilot and control). Findings: It has been proved that 90% of students give a great or very great importance to reception of feedback from their tutors, a relevance they consider to be higher than the one within a face-to-face environment. This percentage is around 75% with regard to the importance given to the level of personalization of feedback. The development of a factor analysis has revealed that usefulness of personalized feedback perceived by the students can be subsumed under two large dimensions: the one that facilitates learning (related to its semantic dimension) and the motivational one (by allowing an easier and more fluid communication with the tutor, contributing not to leave the course, etc.) The latter dimension has been also proved to be key in order to attain improvements in the students’ satisfaction with the learning process. This research was funded by the Catalan government and the UOC, within the framework of projects to Improve Teaching Quality (ITQ). Originality/value: Implementing personalized feedback has a relevant impact on the student, who values it because it makes his learning process easier, richer and more significant. Moreover, it has a clear motivational effect over the student, which had not been sufficiently evidenced by other researches. Such effect needs not to be underestimated, particularly within an on-line environment, where dropout rate is usually high.

Purpose: The analysis of the characteristics of the industrial companies that invest in the training of their human capital in comparison to the organizations that do not train their employees. This characterization is focused especially on the innovative capacity of firms and their technological applications. It also analyzes the factors that determine the likelihood that a company invests in personnel training. Design/methodology/approach: Descriptive characterization of those companies that invest in personnel training, comparing them against those who do not invest in improving its human capital. Furthermore, factors influencing the decision that a company invest in training are analyzed through a logistic regression. Among them we included the intensity of technological usage and the innovation capacity. This research is based on data from the Survey of Business Strategies (ESEE) in 2009, conducted annually. The sample is approximately 1,800 companies, being representative of the Spanish manufacturing sector. Findings and Originality/value: Companies with a higher likelihood of investing in training of their workers are those with a larger number of workers, a higher level of qualification of employees, more stable labor relations, greater participation foreign capital, and also, have a higher level of technological uses, carries more technological partnerships with other organizations and has a more intense innovative activity. Social implications: In the current situation of job destruction and lack of competitiveness of the Spanish industry in increasingly globalized markets, training of workers is seen as the main alternative to increase the productivity of the Spanish industry. This study shows that the industrial structure does not meet the basic conditions described in the scientific literature, in order the companies to train their workers with the risk of exclusion that entails. Originality/value: The study of the characteristics of Spanish companies that invest in training, and the factors that influence the likelihood of this investment, using recent data (2009) with high statistical consistency. There are still few studies that analyze the improvement of human capital in Spain in the current period of economic crisis.

E-learning is broadening education horizons all over the world. The contribution sought by this work is to evidence innovations and practices that are applied in teaching environments and fields of knowledge connected to Economics and Business in an on-line environment. In this sense, some contributions related to concepts and subjects considered as emergent, are presented here. These are, for example, acquisition of competencies in on-line environments, use of Wikipedia applied to statistics, use of tools offered by social networks or the subject of cooperative learning and teamwork. In addition to such contributions, we present some reflections over which are the best future trends of e-learning. In a near future, teachers will be able to make decisions based upon a huge amount of information that will be possible to generate after analysing the learning processes. In any case, everything seems to point at four features that will be progressively incorporated to the on-line learning: release and democratization of contents, addition of elements to motivate students, efficient management of teaching and, lastly, establishment of a tighter linkage between learning and profession.

Existe un amplio consenso en que uno de los elementos clave para garantizar un buen proceso de aprendizaje en un contexto universitario no presencial es la existencia de procesos que pauten y dirijan el aprendizaje, y que permitan a los estudiantes evaluar periódicamente su grado de logro de los conocimientos. Una estrategia habitual para facilitar esta pauta es el uso del feeback entre el estudiante y el profesor. Pero en entornos con grupos de estudiantes de gran dimensión, la realización de este feedback puede convertirse en un trabajo demasiado laborioso y no sostenible. En este artículo presentamos los resultados de tres proyectos piloto centrados en el contexto del grado de Administración y Dirección de empresas (ADE) de la UOC, donde hemos explorado varias herramientas TIC (audio, vídeo y capturas de pantalla) y distintas estrategias para realizar el feedback con el objetivo de hacerlo sostenible en grupos grandes y mejorar la eficacia y eficiencia del proceso de regulación de los aprendizajes.

The use of e-learning for on-the-job training has grown exponentially in the last decade due to it being accepted by people in charge of businesses. Few papers have explored virtual training from the workers’ standpoint, that is, the perception they have about the different training methodologies (face-to-face vs. virtual) and the attitudes they have towards on-the-job learning. Training, in this context, is an investment for both the two participating agents: businesses and workers. It seems logical that knowing the perceptions and attitudes shown by the targets of the training is, at least, as important as knowing the advantages for the companies.To analyse workers’ perceptions and attitudes we conducted an online survey of 2,000 employees of the leading European savings bank, CaixaBank (http://www.caixabank.com/index_en.html), on training habits, perceptions, motivations, and disincentives of undertaking face-to-face or online instruction. The results reveal that workers perceive e-learning as a more flexible and up-to-date training methodology. On the other hand, face-to-face training continues to be perceived as a more motivating methodology compared to virtuality and with better explanations from the course trainers. As regards motivations given by the workers when it comes to training, there are three main groups of attitudes: those which are more affective and social, those which reveal poor adaptability or fear of the new training requirements, and, finally, those linked to the knowledge society.Such results state that while the benefits of distance methodology can be clearly identified from the company’s point of view (i.e., as a flexible and efficient methodology to develop the employees’ skills and knowledge), from the employees’ standpoint, the advantages of virtual training are not so clear and depend to a great extent on their attitude towards the use of virtuality.