Paul Juinn Bing Tan

In recent years, domestic and international airlines alike have been faced with a number of challenges, including economic recessions, rising oil prices, and competition from other convenient travel alternatives, which have caused Taiwan’s various airlines to face substantial financial difficulties. In this study, a questionnaire was administered to examine the service quality of the aviation industry and strategies for aviation industry management were proposed from the perspective of customer value co-creation. The analytic network process approach was employed to elucidate the interactive relationships between evaluation criteria from the managers’ perspective. The entropy method was used to compute the cognitive gap between customers and managers while identifying the strategic means of diminishing these cognitive differences. The analysis results indicated that a company’s understanding of its customers can be enhanced through a four-dimensional (Dialogue, Access, Risk assessment, and Transparency) interactive model. The primary value of the present study is that it combines customers’ concepts regarding value creation with their perceptions of service quality. By doing so, it offers guidance to airlines regarding service quality that can assist them in developing sustainable competitive advantages.

In recent years, the citizens of Taiwan have exhibited an increasing demand for domestic tourism and travel options. Due to their relatively early development as a domestic tourism destination, the Penghu Islands are well known for their rich natural and cultural resources. The purpose of this study was to examine factors influencing tourists’ visits to Qingwan Cactus Park, including their reasons for visiting and their perceptions of their visits. With principal component analysis serving as the basis for an IPA methodology, and using the visiting destination as a reference point, the results obtained can provide a basic guideline for tourism planning. The visitors’ reactions and demands were re-examined through IPA analysis. The results could be used by national park managers to develop constructive suggestions on implementing sustainable development in Taiwan’s tourism industries. This study presents valuable data on Penghu and provides analyses of residents’ and tourists’ opinions, as well as their reactions. The study’s conclusions can be extrapolated to research on other destinations outside of Taiwan.

The administration of A/B exams usually involves the use of items. Issues arise when the pre-establishment of a question bank is necessary and the inconsistency in the knowledge points to be tested (in the two exams) reduces the exams ‘fairness’. These are critical for a large multi-teacher course wherein the teachers are changed such that the course and examination content are altered every few years. However, a fair test with randomly participating students should still be a guaranteed subject with no item pool. Through data-driven decision-making, this study collected data related to a term test for a compulsory general course for empirical assessments, pre-processed the data and used item response theory to statistically estimate the difficulty, discrimination and lower asymptotic for each item in the two exam papers. Binary goal programing was finally used to analyze and balance the fairness of A/B exams without an item pool. As a result, pairs of associated questions in the two exam papers were optimized in terms of their overall balance in three dimensions (as the goals) through the paired exchanges of items. These exam papers guarantee their consistency (in the tested knowledge points) and also ensure the fairness of the term test (a key psychological factor that motivates continued studies). Such an application is novel as the teacher(s) did not have a pre-set question bank and could formulate the fairest strategy for the A/B exam papers. The model can be employed to address similar teaching practice issues.

Using the TAM Model to investigate college students' attitudes toward English e-tutoring websites has rarely been conducted from an information technology and global e-digital market perspective. The present study re-examined the utilization of self-paced e-learning websites for business English based on the assessments of university students. The findings were as follows: 1. Most users of English e-tutoring services believe that the use of such services in learning English provides greater value and convenience than non-online alternatives. This belief can assist the web designers of such websites in the maintenance and enhancement of users’ loyalty to the sites if the web designers take care to ensure the quality of the sites’ e-content. 2. Site designers should also endeavor to ensure that students’ requirements regarding functions relating to knowledge management and website interactions are met such that the students can operate the sites with greater ease as they engage in the learning process. 3. To provide a better understanding of the interface design quality.

Teaching the right things and teaching the things right is essential in English for specific purposes (ESP) language learning programs. ESP language teaching programs for non-English speaking mariners should provide quality in navigational communication. Insufficient communication and coordination are the most dangerous failings in marine safety. This study adopted communicative language teaching (CLT), which is a recent trend in applied linguistics literature that views language learning as a fundamentally social, cultural, and temporal activity. Furthermore, this study sought to explain the importance of ESP language development programs for international maritime safety. Two aspects are essential in training mariners: repetition and clear expression. Two distinct methods are suggested for use in language teaching for international mariners, namely CLT and audio-lingualism.