Online discussion forums are an essential and standard setup in online courses to facilitate interactions among learners. However, learners’ inadequate participation in online discussion forums is a long-standing challenge, which necessitates instructor intervention and the design consideration of online learning platforms. This research proposes and studies the role of mandatory participation, i.e., learners’ participation in online course forums by instructors’ requirements, in fostering their voluntary participation and boosting their learning performance. This novel effect link between mandatory participation and voluntary participation (...) has not been assessed in previous research. An empirical study is conducted using a large-scale dataset of 27,767 learners from a leading massive open online course platform in China. The findings indicate that besides its direct effect on learning performance, learners’ mandatory participation has a significant positive effect on their voluntary participation in online course forums, enhancing learning performance. Moreover, the effect of mandatory participation on voluntary participation varies across learner groups, being more prominent for early registrants than late registrants and part-time learners than full-time learners. This research contributes to the online learning literature by introducing mandatory participation as a viable approach to foster voluntary participation and boost learning performance through enhanced voluntary participation. It provides evidence on the effectiveness of the novel design feature of MOOC platforms that enables and facilitates the mandatory participation mechanism in online learning. (shrink)

The business environment is increasingly uncertain due to the rapid development of disruptive information technologies, the changing global economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This brings great uncertainties to investors to predict the performance changes and risks of companies. This research proposes a sequential data-based framework that aggregates data from multiple sources including both structured and unstructured data to predict the performance changes. It leverages data generated from the early risk warning system in China stock market to measure and predict organization (...) performance changes based on the risk warning status changes of public companies. Different from the models in existing literature that focus on the prediction of risk warning of companies, our framework predicts a portfolio of organization performance changes, including business decline and recovery, thus helping investors to not only predict public company risks, but also discover investment opportunities. By incorporating sequential data, our framework achieves 92.3% macro-F1 value on real-world data from listed companies in China, outperforming other static models. (shrink)

Red tourism, as a form of special interest tourism (SIT), becomes widespread among Chinese tourists. This study aims to explore memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) in red tourism destinations and examines how country competence affects intention to visit similar destinations through the influences on MTEs, destination image, red tourism place attachment, and overall satisfaction. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis is utilized to analyze the data from 556 tourists. Empirical results reveal that country competence positively influences MTEs and (...) destination image. Furthermore, both MTEs and destination image influence overall satisfaction and red tourism place attachment, but do not influence intention to visit other similar destinations; the relationships between overall satisfaction, intention to visit other similar destinations, and place attachment are all confirmed as well. This study represents one of the few studies that classify red tourism as a form of historical-based SIT, with the purpose of promoting country competence. The outcomes provide a better understanding of both scholars and practitioners of historical-based SIT planning and businesses on how to promote destination image and country competence. (shrink)