Typologies and touchpoints: Designing multi-channel digital strategies

Purpose This study aims to gain a clearer understanding of digital channel design. The emergence of new technologies has revolutionised the way companies interact and engage with customers. The driver for this research was the suggestion that practitioners feel they do not possess the skills to understand and exploit new digital channel opportunities. To gain a clearer understanding of digital channel design, this paper addresses the research question: What digital channels do companies from a wide range of industries and sectors use? Design/methodology/approach A content analysis of 100 international companies was conducted with multiple data sources to form a typology of digital “touchpoints”. The appropriateness of a digital channel typology for this study was for developing rigorous and useful concepts for clarifying and refining the meaning of digital channels. Findings This study identifies what digital channels companies globally currently employ and explores the related needs across industries. A total of 34 digital touchpoints and 4 typologies of digital channels were identified across 16 industries. This research helps to identify the relationship between digital channels and enabling the connections with industry. Research limitations/implications The findings contribute to the growing research area of digital channels. The typology of digital channels is a useful starting point for developing a systematic, theory-based study for enabling the development of broader, comprehensive theories of digital channels. Practical implications Typologies and touchpoints are outlined in relation to industry, company objectives and customer needs to allow businesses to seize opportunities and optimise performance through individual touchpoints. A digital channel model as a key outcome of this research guides practitioners on what touchpoint to implement through an interrelated understanding of industry, company and customer needs. Originality/value This is the first paper to explore a range of industries in relation to their use of digital channels using a unique content analysis. Contributions include clarifying and refining digital channel meaning; identifying and refining the hierarchical relations among digital channels(typologies); and establishing typology and industry relationship model.

Automation of underground truck haulage

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in the automation of underground truck haulage. Past attempts at automating LHDs and haul trucks are described and their particular strengths and weaknesses are listed. We argue that the simple auto-tramming systems currently being commercialised, that follow rail-type guides placed along the back, cannot match the performance, flexibility and reliability of systems based on modern mobile robotic principles. In addition, the lack of collision detection research in the underground environment is highlighted.

Making the profitable transition towards sustainable business practice

The last three decades have been difficult for companies and industry. In an increasingly competitive international business climate with shifting national environmental regulations, higher standards are being demanded by the consumer and community groups, not-to-mention the escalating cost of primary resources such as water, steel and minerals. The cause of these pressures is the traditional notion held by business executives and engineers that there is an inherent trade off between eco-efficiency and improving the economic bottom line. However there is significant evidence and examples of best practice to show that there is in fact no trade-off between the environment and the economy if sustainable development through continual improvement is adopted. It is highly possible therefore for companies to make a profitable transition towards sustainable business practice, where along the transition significant business opportunities can be taken advantage of. Companies are by their very nature dynamic, influential and highly capable of adapting to change. Making an organisational transformation to a sustainable business is not outside the capacity of the typical company, who know much of what is needed already to change their activities to satisfy current market demands while achieving competitiveness. However in order to make the transition towards sustainable business practice companies require some key mechanisms such as accurate information on methodologies and opportunities, understanding of the financial and non-financial incentives, permission from stakeholders and shareholders, understanding of the emerging market opportunities, a critical mass of leaders in their sector and demonstrated case studies, and awarding appropriate risk-taking activities undertaken by engineers and CEOs. Satisfying these requirements will adopt an innovative culture within the company that strives for continual improvement and successfully transforms itself to achieve competitiveness in the 21st Century. This paper will summarise the experiences of The Natural Edge Project (TNEP) and its partners in assisting organisations to make a profitable transition towards sustainable business practice through several initiatives. The Natural Advantage of Nations publication provides the critical information required by business leaders and engineers to set the context of sustainable business practice. The Profiting in a Carbon Constrained World report, developed with Natural Capitalism Inc led by Hunter Lovins, summarises the opportunities available to companies to take advantage of the carbon trading market mechanisms such as the Chicago Climate Exchange and European Climate Exchange. The Sustainability Helix then guides the company through the transition by identifying the key tools and methodologies required by companies to reduce environmental loading while dramatically improving resource productivity and achieving competitiveness. Finally, the Engineering Sustainable Solutions Program delivers the key engineering information required by companies and university departments to deliver sustainable engineering solutions. The initiatives are of varying complexity and level of application, however all are designed to provide key staff the critical information required to make a profitable transition towards sustainable business practice. It is then their responsibility to apply and teach their knowledge to the rest of the organisation.

SOTrain: A new program for training supervisors and operators in Australian sugar factories

The provision of effective training of supervisors and operators is essential if sugar factories are to operate profitably and in an environmentally sustainable and safe manner. The benefits of having supervisor and operator staff with a high level of operational skills are reduced stoppages, increased recovery, improved sugar quality, reduced damage to equipment, and reduced OH&S and environmental impacts. Training of new operators and supervisors in factories has traditionally relied on on-the-job training of the new or inexperienced staff by experienced supervisors and operators, supplemented by courses conducted by contractors such as Sugar Research Institute (SRI). However there is clearly a need for staff to be able to undertake training at any time, drawing on the content of online courses as required. An improved methodology for the training of factory supervisors and operators has been developed by QUT on behalf of a syndicate of mills. The new methodology provides ‘at factory’ learning via self-paced modules. Importantly, the training resources for each module are designed to support the training programs within sugar factories, thereby establishing a benchmark for training across the sugar industry. The modules include notes, training guides and session plans, guidelines for walkthrough tours of the stations, learning activities, resources such as videos, animations, job aids and competency assessments. The materials are available on the web for registered users in Australian Mills and many activities are best undertaken online. Apart from a few interactive online resources, the materials for each module can also be downloaded. The acronym SOTrain (Supervisor and Operator Training) has been applied to the new training program.

Practical guidelines for planning and implementing fauna translocations

A successful translocation involves many complex factors, including a genetically appropriate source population that can sustain harvest, social and governmental support, assessment of disease transmission risk and a release site with appropriately secure habitat that can support population establishment and persistance. This information is typically discussed during staturory approval processes and can take considerable time. However, following approval, for translocations of most fauna, the initial critical step involves the inherently stressful process of capture, holding, transportation and release. This process is unpredictable and novel, and is especially challenging for wild animals when they are confined in close proximity to conspecifics and humans. In contrast, captive-reared animals have to cope with the unfamiliar challenges of finding food and shelter, along with coping with competition and predation. Little has been written in the scientific literature about the translocation process. This is unsurprising because this process has usually been the realm of skilled practioners, often with animal husbandry backgrounds, rather than research scientists. Highly skilled intuition, observation and the translocation practioner's equivalent of a 'green thumb' often guides the way. However, theory and experimentation, particularly on the effects of stress, is available and this work is invaluable for a successful translocation. Here, we provide a brief description of the translocation process, and discussion of what stress is and how it can be managed. We then provide practical guidelines for the successful translocation of invertebrates, lizards, turtles, passerine birds, marsupials and bats, using examples from Australia and New Zealand.

Harry Potter and the lexicon of doom

In a three day trial in April 2008, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York considered whether the Harry Potter Lexicon infringed the intellectual property rights of J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers. The case has attracted great media attention. As John Crace, a reporter for The Guardian, observed: “On one side: global-celebrity author J.K. Rowling. On the other: an amateur fan site devoted to the world's favourite boy wizard. At stake: the soul of Harry Potter.” J.K. Rowling is the author of the seven book Harry Potter series, which tell the story of a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his battles with Voldemort, the Lord of Darkness. As the court papers noted, “The Harry Potter Books are a modern day publishing phenomenon and success story.” Warner Brothers sought and obtained the film rights to the series. The entertainment company has thus far produced five films; a sixth is due in November 2008; and the final instalment is planned. The Harry Potter Lexicon is a reference guide created by Steven Vander Ark, a former grade school teacher. He has organised a large volume of material on the Harry Potter books and the Harry Potter films on a website in an alphabetical listing, from “A-Z”. The founder of RDR Books, Roger Rapoport, approached Ark to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon in a book form. Ark agreed to this request, and provided the publisher with a condensed version of the web-site. After RDR Books announced its intention to publish the reference book, J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers brought a legal action in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that the publishers of the Harry Potter Lexicon were in breach of various intellectual property rights. A spokesperson for Warner Brothers and J.K. Rowling observed: "A fan’s affectionate enthusiasm should not obscure acts of plagiarism. The publishers knew what they were doing. The problem remains that the Lexicon takes an enormous amount of Ms. Rowling’s work and adds virtually no original commentary of its own. As we’ve said in court, it takes too much and adds too little. Authors have a duty to prevent the exploitation of their works by people who contribute nothing original, creative or interpretive." The litigation involves the intersection of copyright law, trade mark law, and consumer protection law. It has a wider significance because it deals with the protection of authorial rights; the use of literary indexes, supplements and reference guides; and the clash between character merchandising and fan fiction.

A methodology for extracting legal norms from regulatory documents

We present a methodology to extract legal norms from regulatory documents for their formalisation and later compliance checking. The need for the methodology is motivated from the shortcomings of existing approaches where the rule type and process aspects relevant to the rules are largely overlook. The methodology incorporates the well–known IF. . . THEN structure extended with the process aspect and rule type, and guides how to properly extract the conditions and logical structure of the legal rules for reasoning and modelling of obligations for compliance checking.

Green procurement framework for the Malaysian construction industry

Construction projects have a negative impact on the environment. As Malaysia is planning more construction projects to cater for its current and future development needs, practitioners are urged to undertake greener approaches to construction. One of the efforts is the introduction of green procurement, which is promoted under the Malaysian Government’s MyHijau initiative. Construction procurement is recognised as a tool to shift the construction business into a greener industry. However, the implementation of green procurement in Malaysia is still in its infancy and faces a number of challenges, such as the lack of knowledge. A significant gap has been found between policy formulation and actual project delivery as there are no practical guidelines for stakeholders to procure environmental-friendly construction projects. To address this problem, the present research (as part of an ongoing PhD project) aims to develop a green procurement framework that guides stakeholders in procuring green projects in Malaysia. This article highlights the concept of green procurement in Malaysia, the work carried out to date to achieve the research objectives and the preliminary framework that has been established. It is hoped that this research will help academics and practitioners to further explore the potential of green procurement to improve sustainability in the current construction industry practices.

Ad hoc communities on the road: Serendipitous social encounters to enhance tourist experiences

Driving can be a lonely activity. While there has been a lot of research and technical inventions concerning car-to-car communication and passenger entertainment, there is still little work concerning connecting drivers. Whereas tourism is very much a social activity, drive tourists and road trippers have few options to communicate with fellow travelers. Our study is placed at the intersection of tourism and driving. It aims to enhance the trip experience during driving through social interaction. This paper explores how a mobile application that allows instant messaging between travelers sharing similar context can establish a temporary, ad hoc community and enhance the road trip experience. A prototype was developed and evaluated in various user and field studies. The study’s outcomes are relevant for the design of future mobile tourist guides that benefit from community design, social encounters and recommendations.

Pedagogical tools designed to promote engagement and active learning in the biomedical sciences and allied health disciplines

Perceiving students, science students especially, as mere consumers of facts and information belies the importance of a need to engage them with the principles underlying those facts and is counter-intuitive to the facilitation of knowledge and understanding. Traditional didactic lecture approaches need a re-think if student classroom engagement and active learning are to be valued over fact memorisation and fact recall. In our undergraduate biomedical science programs across Years 1, 2 and 3 in the Faculty of Health at QUT, we have developed an authentic learning model with an embedded suite of pedagogical strategies that foster classroom engagement and allow for active learning in the sub-discipline area of medical bacteriology. The suite of pedagogical tools we have developed have been designed to enable their translation, with appropriate fine-tuning, to most biomedical and allied health discipline teaching and learning contexts. Indeed, aspects of the pedagogy have been successfully translated to the nursing microbiology study stream at QUT. The aims underpinning the pedagogy are for our students to: (1) Connect scientific theory with scientific practice in a more direct and authentic way, (2) Construct factual knowledge and facilitate a deeper understanding, and (3) Develop and refine their higher order flexible thinking and problem solving skills, both semi-independently and independently. The mindset and role of the teaching staff is critical to this approach since for the strategy to be successful tertiary teachers need to abandon traditional instructional modalities based on one-way information delivery. Face-to-face classroom interactions between students and lecturer enable realisation of pedagogical aims (1), (2) and (3). The strategy we have adopted encourages teachers to view themselves more as expert guides in what is very much a student-focused process of scientific exploration and learning. Specific pedagogical strategies embedded in the authentic learning model we have developed include: (i) interactive lecture-tutorial hybrids or lectorials featuring teacher role-plays as well as class-level question-and-answer sessions, (ii) inclusion of “dry” laboratory activities during lectorials to prepare students for the wet laboratory to follow, (iii) real-world problem-solving exercises conducted during both lectorials and wet laboratory sessions, and (iv) designing class activities and formative assessments that probe a student’s higher order flexible thinking skills. Flexible thinking in this context encompasses analytical, critical, deductive, scientific and professional thinking modes. The strategic approach outlined above is designed to provide multiple opportunities for students to apply principles flexibly according to a given situation or context, to adapt methods of inquiry strategically, to go beyond mechanical application of formulaic approaches, and to as much as possible self-appraise their own thinking and problem solving. The pedagogical tools have been developed within both workplace (real world) and theoretical frameworks. The philosophical core of the pedagogy is a coherent pathway of teaching and learning which we, and many of our students, believe is more conducive to student engagement and active learning in the classroom. Qualitative and quantitative data derived from online and hardcopy evaluations, solicited and unsolicited student and graduate feedback, anecdotal evidence as well as peer review indicate that: (i) our students are engaging with the pedagogy, (ii) a constructivist, authentic-learning approach promotes active learning, and (iii) students are better prepared for workplace transition.

Serendipitous road trips: Enhancing tourists’ experiences through social interaction

Driving can be a lonely activity. While there has been a lot of research and technical inventions concerning car-to-car communication and passenger entertainment, there is still little work concerning connecting drivers. Whereas tourism is very much a social activity, drive tourists have few options to communicate with fellow travellers. The proposed project is placed at the intersection of tourism and driving and aims to enhance the trip experience during driving through social interaction. This thesis explores how a mobile application that allows instant messaging between travellers sharing similar context can add to road trip experiences. To inform the design of such an application, the project adopted the principle of the user-centred design process. User needs were assessed by running an ideation workshop and a field trip. Findings of both studies have shown that tourists have different preferences and diverse attitudes towards contacting new people. Yet all participants stressed the value of social recommendations. Based on those results and a later expert review, three prototype versions of the system were created. A prototyping session with potential end users highlighted the most important features including the possibility to view user profiles, choose between text and audio input and receive up-to-date information. An implemented version of the prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to identify usability related problems in an actual use case scenario as well as to find implementation bugs. The outcomes of this research are relevant for the design of future mobile tourist guides that leverage from benefits of social recommendations.

All of Us

All of Us is a ground-breaking Australian government approved anti-bullying educational resource comprised of seven online videos that feature gender diverse, sexual diverse and intersex youths. The videos, along with unit guides and student handouts, have been designed to address a gap in high school curriculum as they teach not just about sexual diversity and gender diversity but also the values of empathy and respect, which has been demonstrated to improve students’ wellbeing and educational engagement. The resource captures the real life experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex young people through a collection of short videos and teaching activities that are aligned to the Year 7/8 Health and Physical Education learning area of the Australian Curriculum. All Of Us has been developed to have a real impact on student attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and to encourage whole school change that affirms and supports the right of all students, staff and families to feel safe at school. This free video resource is widely available and allows all schools, regardless of experience, location or funding, the chance to create an environment where every student can learn, every teacher can teach and every family can belong from the beginning of 2016. The resource was launched on Thursday, 26 November 2015 at Treasury Theatre, 1 Macarthur St, Melbourne. The launch was attended by almost 200 people including former Safe Schools Coalition Ambassador Jason Ball, Victorian Commissioner for Gender and Sexuality Ro Allen, Chris Bush, Executive Producer of All Of Us, Micah Scott, CEO of Minus18, All Of Us Margot Fink; Safe Schools Coalition Victoria's Manager Roz Ward and; Sally Richardson, National Program Director of Safe Schools Coalition Australia.

Regional resilience: Pre-service teacher preparation to teach in the bush

This paper reports on the outcomes of a two year ALTC Competitive Research and Development Project that aimed to "Develop Strategies at the Pre-Service Level to Address Critical Teacher Attraction and Retention Issues in Australian Rural, Regional and Remote Schools". As well as developing a ‘training framework’ and teaching guides to increase the capacity and credibility of four universities to prepare educators who might venture out of the metropolitan area to teach, data were gathered from pre-service and graduate teachers to analyse regional resilience. It was found that there was a strong likelihood to participate in a regional practicum and stay in a non-metropolitan community once they graduated from university if they had a positive attitude to regional Western Australia either through a family connection or previous experience. Recommendations from this study emphasise the importance of having pre-service students participate in positive regional experiences early in their university study.

Creating physical education in remote Australian schools: Overcoming the tyranny of distance through communities of practice

This paper reports on a qualitative case study undertaken in a remote part of Queensland, Australia. While there is some modest agreement about the capacity of contemporary information technologies to overcome the problems of schooling in areas of extreme remoteness, generally, children educated in such contexts are considered to be disadvantaged. The experiential areas of the curriculum, which often require specific teaching expertise, present the greatest challenge to teachers, and of these, physical education is perhaps the most problematic. This research reports on a case study of three remote Queensland multi-age primary (elementary) schools that come together to form a community of practice to overcome the problems of teaching physical education in such difficult circumstances. Physical education is constructed in these contexts by blurring the school and community boundaries, by contextualizing the subject content to make it relevant, and by adjusting the school day to accommodate potential physical education experiences. Each community gathers its collective experience to ensure the widest possible experiences are made available for the children. In doing so, the children develop a range of competencies that enable seamless transition to boarding high schools.

Adaptation of the Australian core food groups to enable planning of vegan and lactovegetarian diets

This work demonstrates how the Australian core food groups system can be modified to enable the planning of vegan and lactovegetarian diets as well as omnivorous diets. In the modified version the cereals, vegetables and fruits groups remain the same as in the core food groups system, while the meat group is replaced with legumes, soya products, nuts and seeds. The milk group becomes milk or fortified soya milk, to allow for both lactovegetarian and vegan diets. The core food groups standard of 70% of the recommended dietary intake was adopted as a target for determining recommendations on the minimum number of serves from each food group. As found in the development of the core food groups system, zinc was the most limiting nutrient. Vitamin B 12 and calcium were other limiting nutrients in the vegan and lactovegetarian guides. The number of serves from each group required to meet 70% of the applicable recommended dietary intake has been calculated for children from four years old, adult men and women and pregnant and lactating women. It was found that the number of serves from each food group required in the vegan and lactovegetarian planning guides was in most cases similar to the number of serves of corresponding core food groups specified for a particular population group. This suggests that the vegan and lactovegetarian planning guides could be incorporated into a modified core food groups planning guide. Such a guide would cater for the general omnivorous population as well as for those seeking to avoid meat and/or dairy products. (Aust J Nutr Diet 1999:56:22-30) Key words: vegan, vegetarian, food guide, food groups, dietary planning.