Aalesund University College

About: Aalesund University College is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Modular design & Customer retention. The organization has 96 authors who have published 234 publications receiving 3917 citations.

What accounts for students' loyalty? Some field study evidence

Abstract: Purpose – Public funding of institutions offering higher education is becoming scarcer, more complex, and to an ever‐increasing extent performance‐based. Concerning the teaching area the financing is partly based on student credits and professional degrees. Thus student loyalty has become an important strategic theme. The purpose is to study relationships between student satisfaction, students' perceptions of the reputation of an educational institution and student loyalty; hypothesizing positive relationships between satisfaction and loyalty, reputation and loyalty, and between satisfaction and reputation. Antecedents of student satisfaction and reputation are also included in the study.Design/methodology/approach – The data source is a survey among students at the bachelor level of a university college in Norway, analyzed by a structural equation modeling approach.Findings – The findings strongly support the three hypotheses. The university college may be looked upon as being satisfaction‐driven. Still ...

Images, Satisfaction and Antecedents: Drivers of Student Loyalty? A Case Study of a Norwegian University College

Abstract: Even if images and allied constructs, especially identity and reputation, have received considerable attention in recent years, research efforts have mainly focused on those allied constructs and not on their interplay with related constructs. This study examines two models to explore the relationships among service quality, facilities, student satisfaction, image of the university college, and image of the study program, with student loyalty as the ultimate dependent variable. The students perceive the image of the university college and the image of the study program as two distinct concepts. The study's preferred model only indirectly relates the image of the study program to student loyalty (via the image of the university college) while student satisfaction and the image of the university college are directly related to student loyalty. Student satisfaction has the highest degree of association with student loyalty, representing a total effect about three times the effect of the image of the university college. Service quality only loads on student satisfaction, while the variable representing facilities loads on student satisfaction, the image of the university college and the image of the study program. The predictor variables included can explain a considerable amount of the variance of student loyalty.

The design of compassionate care.

Abstract: Aims and objectives To investigate the tension between individual and organisational responses to contemporary demands for compassionate interactions in health care. Background Health care is often said to need more compassion among its practitioners. However, this represents a rather simplistic view of the issue, situating the problem with individual practitioners rather than focusing on the overall design of care and healthcare organisations, which have often adopted a production-line approach. Design This is a position paper informed by a narrative literature review. Methods A search of the PubMed, Science Direct and CINAHL databases for the terms compassion, care and design was conducted in the research literature published from 2000 through to mid-2013. Results There is a relatively large literature on compassion in health care, where authors discuss the value of imbuing a variety of aspects of health services with compassion including nurses, other practitioners and, ultimately, among patients. This contrasts with the rather limited attention that compassionate practice has received in healthcare curricula and the lack of attention to how compassion is informed by organisational structures and processes. We discuss how making the clinic more welcoming for patients and promoting bidirectional compassion and compassion formation in nursing education can be part of an overall approach to the design of compassionate care. Conclusions We discuss a number of ways in which compassion can be enhanced through training, educational and organisational design, through exploiting the potential of brief opportunities for communication and through initiatives involving patients and service users, as well as practitioners and service leaders. Relevance to clinical practice The development of contemporary healthcare systems could usefully address the overall design of compassionate care rather than blame individual practitioners for a lack of compassion.

Optimal Harvesting of Farmed Fish

Abstract: This paper analyzes the optimal harvesting of farmed fish. A biological model for a yearclass of fish is specified. Output price and costs are added to constitute a bioeconomic model. The effects of economic and biological parameters on optimal harvesting are analyzed. Examples of optimal harvesting for salmon and turbot are given.

Big data and industrial Internet of Things for the maritime industry in Northwestern Norway

Abstract: Big Data Analytics (BDA) and Internet of Things (IoT) are rising quickly. The recent emerging Industrial IoT (IIoT), a sub-paradigm of IoT, focuses more in safety-critical industrial applications. Studies showed that the adoption of BDA increase companies' output and productivity; IoT enables companies to have more information and control in physical resources, processes, and environments; BDA and IIoT complement each other and develop as a double “helix”. In this position paper, we briefly review the opportunities and challenges in this era of big data and IoT for the More maritime cluster; then we propose a new framework integrating BDA and IIoT technologies for offshore support vessels (OSVs) based on a hybrid CPU/GPU/FPGA1 high performance computing platform. We believe that such a framework, when implemented, can help maritime companies increase their output and productivity, and hence enable the whole cluster to continue to be a leader in the global maritime industry.