143174 research outputs found
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Exploring student experience in block teaching: A pedagogic inquiry at a post 1992 university
No full textBlock teaching is an emerging transformative approach in higher education, aimed at enhancing student engagement, retention, and success. De Montfort University has implemented a block curriculum model to enhance the student learning experience. While previous research has focused on student attainment (Buck and Tyrrell, 2022), this study expands the discourse by examining student transitions, sustainability, and the work-life-study balance within this delivery model. Responding to the need for deeper understanding of block delivered student experience, a research initiative was launched in 2023. This study investigates the effectiveness of block teaching by exploring student perspectives on key aspects of their academic journey, focusing on transitions, well-being, and sustainability, influenced by the research methodology of Wilson et al (2024). The research builds upon previous projects, including a Quality Assurance Agency Collaborative Enhancement Project (QAA 2024), yet distinguishes itself through the use of primary data collection. Following ethical approval, qualitative data was collected via a series of semi-structured focus groups. These focus groups were designed to explore students’ lived experiences and perceptions of block delivery, particularly regarding transitions, balancing academic, work, and personal responsibilities, and sustainability. Thematic analysis identified patterns in student narratives. The findings are communicated in this presentation under the core areas of transition, well-being, and sustainability, linked to the critical factors in shaping the student experience. We also discuss the impact of these findings on next steps. This research advances scholarly knowledge on block curriculum delivery, moving beyond attainment-focused studies to capture a holistic understanding of student experiences. The findings will inform institutional policy, pedagogic strategies, and student support, while contributing to the broader academic discourse on delivery models in higher education. Further, scholarly outputs will share insights with the sector, reinforcing our university’s role in leading innovative curriculum design. References Buck, E., & Tyrrell, K. (2022). Block and blend: A mixed method investigation into the impact of a pilot block teaching and blended learning approach upon student outcomes and experience. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 46(8), 1078-1091. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2022.2050686 QAA. (2024). Evaluating the Impact of Block Delivery. https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/benefits-of-qaa-membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/learning-and-teaching/evaluating-the-impact-of-block-delivery Wilson, E., Roche, T., Goode, E., & McKenzie, J. W. (2024). Creating the conditions for student success through curriculum reform: The impact of an active learning, immersive block model. Higher Education, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01283-
An improved adaptive large neighborhood search for the home health care routing and scheduling problem with multiple mixed time windows
No full textThe file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The growing challenges posed by population aging and urbanization have intensified the need for efficient home health care (HHC) services to alleviate the great pressure on healthcare resources. This study addresses the Home Health Care Routing and Scheduling Problem (HHCRSP), which involves optimizing caregivers’ daily schedules while considering complex real-world constraints, including skill matching, mixed hard and soft time windows, synchronized services, and workload balancing. To address these challenges, a novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and an improved adaptive large neighbourhood search (IALNS) algorithm are proposed. The algorithm integrates an elite archive mechanism and introduces new removal and insertion operators, thus maintains archive diversity, and effectively explores the solution space through reconstruction, crossover, and mutation. Furthermore, it adopts a two-stage approach to ensure solution feasibility. Extensive computational experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method and the competitiveness of the IALNS. Also, we examine the impact of the proportion of clients purchasing on-time services, time window penalty coefficients, and the number of available time windows on scheduling solutions. These findings underscore the proposed algorithm’s potential to reduce the cost of HHC services
Entrepreneurial leadership and MSME performance in resource-constrained uncertain contexts: insights from Ethiopia
No full textopen access articleThis study examines the influence of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) attributes on the effectiveness of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Ethiopia, a context characterised by institutional voids and resource constraints. Drawing on survey data from 356 MSME leaders, hierarchical regression analysis was employed to test the impact of five EL dimensions—creativity, opportunity-seeking, vision, decision-making, and risk-taking. The findings reveal that creativity and opportunity-seeking positively and significantly improve firm effectiveness, underscoring their importance in enabling adaptability and resilience in resource-constrained settings. In contrast, vision and decision-making exhibit no significant influence, reflecting the challenges of long-term strategic orientation under volatile institutional and political conditions. Counterintuitively, risk-taking demonstrates a negative and significant effect, highlighting how high uncertainty and weak institutional support exacerbate entrepreneurial vulnerability. Environmental dynamism emerges as a positive moderator, enabling leaders to navigate complexities through informal networks and adaptive strategies. These results suggest that the effectiveness of EL is heavily contingent upon contextual conditions rather than leadership attributes alone. The study contributes to entrepreneurship and leadership scholarship by advancing context-sensitive understandings of EL and offers policy insights for fostering MSME growth in fragile institutional environments
Exploring British South-Asian Women Academics’ Experiences In Higher Education Employment
No full textThis project focuses on exploring the experiences of British South-Asian women academics in HE. The work builds on exploring the diverse identities and ethnicities of women of colour in academia/HE which risk being homogenised within the ‘BAME’ categories. This research focuses on the identities and experiences of British South-Asian female academics, building on the work around identity, positionality, experience in HE and intersectionality.
Preliminary findings from the project were presented at the conference
Advancing the visual turn in tourism, hospitality and leisure studies
No full textopen access articlePurpose
This conceptual paper aims to inspire further advancement of the visual turn in tourism, hospitality and leisure studies. It offers an updated overview of the implications of different philosophical positions for visual data and provides insights into both big and small data studies. Future research possibilities within the visual turn in these fields of studies are also discussed.
Design/methodology/approach
Given the conceptual nature of this paper, the lines of arguments are largely informed by existing literature in both the wider social sciences and humanities as well as the multidisciplinary fields of tourism, hospitality and leisure studies. While not attempting to provide a systematic review, this paper critically discusses both the wide variety of visual data types used in tourism, hospitality and leisure research, as well as the relevant, philosophy of science informed, theoretical framing of visual research.
Findings
This paper offers insights into possible futures for the visual turn in tourism, hospitality and leisure, while being neither prescriptive nor favouring a particular philosophical position or methodology. Some of the key directions for the future of the visual turn in fact, are expected to be influenced by the very diversity of approaches. Namely, both big and small data studies are expected to play a significant role in visual tourism, hospitality and leisure studies in the future, in much the same way the studies underpinned by the broad umbrellas of paradigms belonging to a variety of different paradigms will.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in its offering of an updated meaningful synthesis of relevant literature which spans across disciplines and fields of studies to offer both an overview of the current state of the visual turn in tourism, hospitality and leisure studies and visions for its future. This is supported through an updated table outlining the key paradigms and their implications for visual data, and an emphasis of the important roles both big and small data studies play in knowledge production in these fields of studies
Robust topology optimization of piezoelectric actuators under uncertainties in material properties
No full textThe file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Actuators designed using piezoelectric materials are widely used in micro-robotic systems. Although topology optimization is a systematic design approach with the potential to conceive a novel piezoelectric actuator, the optimality of the design cannot be guaranteed unless the material uncertainties resulting from complex fabrication are considered. Therefore, this study presents the optimal design of a piezoelectric actuator and investigates the impact of uncertainties on the designed layout. Specifically, this study introduces material uncertainties through Young's modulus and the piezoelectric coefficient individually and concurrently, thus facilitating a comprehensive exploration of design robustness. The density-based topology optimization method used in this study incorporates the spatial distribution of material densities and polarities within the domain. To evaluate the robustness of the results of the proposed method, a thorough comparison with the Monte Carlo method (MC) results was conducted, revealing not only the robustness of the designed layouts but also enhanced computational efficiency
American Imperialism in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Documentary History, 1775–1919, Volume IV, From the Treaty of Paris to the Paris Peace Conference, 1898–1919
No full textThis volume documents the formation of the United States’ colonial and informal empire in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Central America at the turn of the twentieth century. Taking the cessation of hostilities with Spain as its starting point, this final volume traces the evolution of United States imperialism through to the end of the First World War. The expansion of the United States’ empire during the early twentieth century mirrored its rise on the world stage. Through overseas colonial expansion and the construction of an informal empire centred on the Panama Canal, the United States strove for hegemony in the Americas, and its imperial policies altered the lives of thousands who lived outside its national borders. Specific territories, such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, are explored in this volume alongside regional and thematic accounts to provide a detailed and unique insight into the nature of United States imperialism. A host of historic perspectives are presented through a range of source material, including letters, government documents, and published material
A Privacy-Enhancing Image Encryption Algorithm for Securing Medical Images
No full textopen access articleThe growing digitization of healthcare has amplified concerns about the privacy and security of medical images, as conventional encryption methods often fail to provide sufficient protection. To address this gap, we propose a privacy-enhancing image encryption algorithm that integrates SHA-256 hashing, block-wise processing (16 × 16 with zero-padding), DNA encoding with XOR operations, and logistic map-driven key generation into a unified framework. This synergistic design balances efficiency and robustness by embedding data integrity verification, ensuring high sensitivity to initial conditions, and achieving strong diffusion through dynamic DNA rules. Experimental results confirm that the scheme achieves high NPCR (0.997), UACI (0.289), entropy (7.995), and PSNR (27.89 dB), outperforming comparable approaches while maintaining scalability to large image formats and robustness under compression (JPEG quality factors 90 and 70). These findings demonstrate that the proposed method offers an efficient and resilient solution for securing medical images, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and practical applicability in real-world healthcare environments
Place-based Net Zero Governance: Investigating Local Authority Collaboration on Local Area Energy Plans
No full textThe United Kingdom has committed, through a legally-binding target, to achieve net zero emissions in the UK economy by 2050. The UK government envisages local authorities as being critical actors in achieving net zero, including through commissioning and co-ordinating delivery of Local Area Energy Plans. Net zero initiatives require action and co-ordination at different scales, making regional, sub-regional and local governance structures, and linkages between them, a key consideration to enable investment and delivery of energy projects.
This research aims to investigate how effective collaboration and governance arrangements to enhance delivery of net zero energy projects can be developed in a specific English sub-region.
Data was collected through a series of semi-structured interviews with local government officers and delivery partners (local and national) and within stakeholder group meetings from March to July 2025. Interviews were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, based on human- and machine-generated coding, and contrasted following both analyses.
Our findings highlight a range of challenges and opportunities impacting on governance and delivery of local net zero energy projects. These include that net zero is often viewed as solely under the remit of a “sustainability department” rather than a cross-cutting responsibility; that communication of the co-benefits of net zero projects are not effectively conveyed to or understood by senior officers and leadership, and that the current context of local government reorganisation in England makes establishing long term structures to enable collaboration and investment highly challenging until new unitary and strategic authorities are established. Our work also highlights the methodological potential of integrated human-generated and supervised machine-generated thematic analysis of qualitative data
Drag on a hollow sphere can increase with porosity
No full textPrevious literature has shown that the introduction of homogeneous perforation on plates and cylinders decreases aerodynamic drag. Here, it is shown that the opposite is true for a sphere; drag can increase with porosity. Hollow porous spheres exposed to a uniform free stream are studied experimentally using force and flow field measurements. The parameter space encompasses moderate to high Reynolds numbers (5×10⁴≤Re≤4×10⁵) and porosities ranging from 0% to 80%. The main conclusion is that drag increases with porosity, at super-critical Reynolds numbers, for all studied porosities. At low porosities (less than 9%), the effect of porosity on drag can be explained by shifts in the separation point. At higher porosities the drag increase cannot be explained by separation shifts, and instead is explained by two competing forms of kinetic energy dissipation: (i) shear on the macro-scale of the body, and (ii) hole losses from flow through the pores. The former generally decreases with porosity, as bleeding flow passing through the body decreases the characteristic velocity difference in the body-scale wake. In a sphere, hole losses increase with porosity sufficiently fast to overcome decreasing body-scale shear losses, in contrast to plates and cylinders where this is not the case. Relatively weak wake vortex structures, and associated low drag coefficient at zero porosity, for a sphere reduce the impact of wake bleeding. Moreover, fluid entering the fore of a sphere can exit perpendicular to the free stream, further reducing wake bleeding while still contributing to hole losses