There has been a set of discussions about lock-in around Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Joe McKendrick and Lori MacVittie in particular bring out some of the real challenges here.

Lori brings out the difference between portability and mobility. While I'm not in 100% agreement with Lori's definitions, there is a key point here: its not just code, its the services that the code relies on that buy lock-in into a cloud.

So for example, if you use Amazon SQS, Force.com Chatter Collaboration, Google App Engine's bigtable data store, all of these tie you into the cloud you are deployed onto. Amazon isn't really a PaaS yet, so the tie-in is minimal, but Google App Engine (GAE) is based on Authentication, Logging, Data, Cache and other core services. Its almost impossible to imagine building an app without these, and they all tie you into GAE. Similarly, VMForce relies on a set of services from force.com.

But its not just about mobility between force.com and Google: between two PaaSes. The typical enterprise needs a private cloud as much as public cloud. So there is a bigger question:

Can you move your application from a private PaaS to a public Paas and back again?

In other words, even if Google and Force got together and defined a mobility layer, can I then take an app I built and run it internally? Neither Google nor Force is offering a private PaaS.

The second key question is this:

How can I leverage standard Enterprise Architecture in a PaaS?

What I'm getting at here is that as the world starts to implement PaaS, does this fit with existing models? Force.com and Google App Engine have effectively designed their own world view. VMForce and the recent Spring/Google App Engine announcement address one aspect of that - what Lori calls portability. By using Spring as an application model, there is at least a passing similarity to current programming models in Enterprises. But Enterprise Architectures are not just about Java code: what about an ESB? What about a Business Process engine (BPMS)? What about a standard XACML-based entitlement engine? So far PaaS has generally only addressed the most basic requirements of Enterprise core services: databases and a identity model.

So my contention is this: you need a PaaS that supports the same core services that a modern Enterprise architecture has: ESB, BPMS, Authentication/Authorization, Portal, Data, Cache, etc. And you need a PaaS that works inside your organization as well as in a public Cloud. And if you really don't want any lock-in.... hadn't that PaaS better be Open Source as well? And yes, this is a hint of things coming very soon!

Yesterday we announced something I believe is a game-changer: WSO2 Stratos. What is Stratos?

WSO2 Stratos is a complete SOA and developer platform offered as a self-service, multi-tenant, elastic runtime for private and public cloud infrastructures.

What that means is that our complete SOA platform - now enhanced with Tomcat and Webapp support - is available as a  "cloud native" runtime that you can either use on the Web (yes - you can try it out right now), on Amazon VPC, or on your own internal private cloud based on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Eucalyptus and (coming soon) vmWare vSphere. It is a complete Platform-as-a-Service for private and public clouds.

I'll be writing more about Stratos over the coming weeks and months, and I'll also provide links and tweets to other Stratos blogs, but in this blog I want to simply answer three questions:

1. I'm already talking to {vmWare, Eucalyptus, Ubuntu, Savvis, Joyent} about private cloud - what does WSO2 add that they don't have?
2. What is the difference between Stratos and the Cloud Images that WSO2 already ships?
3. Why would I choose WSO2 over the other vendors offering Platform-as-a-Service?

In order to answer the first question, lets look at the cloud computing space, which is most easily divided up into:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): this is where Amazon, Eucalyptus, vmWare, Saavis and Joyent play
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Google App Engine, vmForce, Tibco Silver and now WSO2 Stratos play in this space.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Google Apps, Google Mail, Microsoft Office Live, Salesforce, SugarOnDemand - these and many more make up the SaaS category.

To generalize wildly, most people talking about public cloud today are talking about SaaS. And most people talking about private cloud today are talking about IaaS.

SaaS is fantastic for quick productivity and low cost. WSO2 uses Google Apps, Sugar on Demand and several other SaaS apps. But SaaS doesn't create competitive advantage. Mule also uses Google Apps. They may well use Salesforce. SaaS cannot produce competitive advantage because your competitors get access to exactly the same low-cost services you do. In order to create competitive advantage you need to build as well as buy. For example, we use our Mashup Server together with our Sugar Business Messaging Adapter to provide insight and management of our pipeline that goes beyond what Sugar offers.

IaaS is of course a great basis to build apps. But it's just infrastructure. Yes - you get your VM hosted quicker. But someone has to create a useful VM. And that is where PaaS comes in. PaaS is how to speed up cloud development.

What does Stratos give you on top of an IaaS? It gives you an Application Server, Registry, Identity Server, Portal, ESB, Business Activity Monitor and Mashup Server. And it gives you these as-a-Service: completely self-service, elasticly scalable, and granularly metered and monitored. Someone in your team needs an ESB - they can provision one for themselves instantly. And because it's multi-tenant, it costs nothing to run until it gets used. How do you know how it's used? The metering and monitoring tells you exactly how much each tenant uses.

2. What is the difference between Stratos and the existing WSO2 Cloud Images?

The cloud images we started shipping in December are not Cloud Native. Stratos is Cloud Native. In practice, this means that when you log into Stratos (go on try it now) you can instantly provision your own domain, together with a set of Stratos services. This saves memory - instead of allocating a new VM and minimum half a gigabyte of memory to each new server you get a new ESB with zero extra memory cost. And it's much easier. The new ESB will automatically be governed and monitored. It's automatically elastically clustered.

3. Why would I choose WSO2 over other PaaS vendors?

Firstly, if you look at PaaS as a whole there is a huge divide between Public PaaS and Private PaaS. The public PaaS vendors simply don't offer private options. You can't run force.com or Google App Engine applications internally, even if you want to. WSO2 bridges that gap with a PaaS you can use in the public Web, on a virtual private cloud, or on premises.

The second big differentiator between WSO2 and the existing PaaS offerings is the architecture. Mostly PaaS is a way of building webapps. WSO2 offers a complete enterprise architecture - governance, business process, integration, portal, identity and mashups. And we support the common Enterprise Programming Model (not just Java, WebApp, JAX-WS, but also BPEL, XSLT, XPath, Google Gadgets, WSDL, etc). The only other PaaS that I know of that offers a full Enterprise architecture is Tibco Silver.

The third and most important differentiator is about lock-in. Software vendors love lock-in - and Cloud vendors love it even more. So if you code to Google App Engine, you are tied into Google's identity model, Google's Bigtable, etc. If you code to force.com or vmForce - you are tied to force's infrastructure services. If you code to Tibco Silver, you are tied to Tibco. WSO2 fights this in three ways:

• No code lock-in: we use standards-based coding (WAR, JAX-WS, POJO) and Stratos is 100% Apache License Open Source.
• No model lock-in: we use standards-based services: 
• Identity is based on OpenID, OAuth, XACML, WS-Trust
• Registry is based on AtomPub and REST
• Business Process is based on BPEL, etc
• No hosting lock-in: you can take you apps and data from our public PaaS and re-deploy internally or on your own virtual private cloud anytime you like.

I hope you found this a useful introduction to Stratos. If you want more information, contact me paul@wso2.com, or check out the Stratos website or code.

Knowledge, innovations and their implementation in effective practices are essential for development in all fields of societal action, e.g. policy, business, health, education, and everyday life. However, managing the interrelations between knowledge, innovation and practice is complicated. Facilitation by suitable knowledge services is needed. This paper explores the theory of converging knowledge, innovation, and practice, discusses some advances in information systems development, and identifies general requirements for pragmatic knowledge services. A trialogical approach to knowledge creation and learning is adopted as a viable theoretical basis. Also three examples of novel knowledge services Opasnet, Innovillage, and Knowledge Practices Environment (KPE), are presented. Eventually, it is concluded that pragmatic knowledge services, as hybrid systems of information technology and its users, are not only means for creation of practical knowledge, but vehicles of a cultural change from individualistic perceptions of knowledge work towards mediated collaboration.

One of the challenges in Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) is how to support the coordination of multiple instances of a service feature. In particular, there is a need for a decentralized decision-making capability that will be able to seamlessly integrate new instances of a service feature without an omniscient central controller. Because of the need for decentralization, we are investigating principles from self-organization in biological organisms. As an initial proof of concept, we have applied three bio-inspired techniques to a simple smart home scenario: quorum sensing based service activation, a firefly algorithm for synchronization, and a gossiping (epidemic) protocol for information dissemination. In this paper, we first explain why we selected those techniques using a set of motivating scenarios of a smart home and then describe our experiences in adopting them.

Web Services have become a standard for integration of systems in distributed environments. By using a set of open interoperability standards, they allow computer-computer interaction, regardless the programming languages and operating systems used. The Semantic Web Services, by its turn, make use of ontologies to describe their functionality in a more structural manner, allowing computers to reason about the information required and provided by them. Such a description also allows dynamic composition of several Web Services, when only one is not able to provide the desired functionality. There are scenarios, however, in which only the functional correctness is not enough to fulfill the user requirements, and a minimum level of quality should be guaranteed by their providers. In this context, this work presents an approach for dynamic Web Service composition that takes into account the composition overall quality. The proposed approach relies on a heuristics to efficiently perform the composition. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, a Web Service composition application prototype was developed and experimented with public test sets, along with another approach that does not consider quality in the composition process. The results have shown that the proposed approach in general finds compositions with more quality, within a reasonable processing time.

Service composition is an effective approach for large-scale multimedia delivery. In previous works, user requirement is represented as one fixed functional path which is composed of several functional components in a certain order. Actually, there may be several functional paths (deliver different quality level multimedia data, e.g., image pixel, frame rate) that can meet one request. And due to the diversity of devices and connections in pervasive environment, system should choose a suitable media quality delivery path in accordance with context, instead of one fixed functional path. This paper presents a deep study of multimedia delivery problem and proposes an on-line algorithm LDPath and an off-line centralized algorithm LD/RPath respectively. LDPath aims at delivering multimedia data to end user with lowest delay by choosing services to build delivery paths hop-by-hop, which is adapted to the unstable open environment. And LD/RPath is developed for a relatively stable environment, which generates delivery paths according to the trade-off between delay and reliability metrics, because the service reliability is also an important fact in such scenario. Experimental results show that both algorithms have good performance with low overhead to the system.

Vehicular Networks, including Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) and Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs), stimulate a brand new variety of services, ranging from driver safety services, traffic information and warnings regarding traffic jams and accidents, to providing weather or road condition, parking availability, and advertisement. 3G networks and sophisticated Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including deploying costly roadside base stations, can indeed be used to offer such services, but these come with a cost, both at network and hardware levels. In this paper we introduce Cooperation as a service (CaaS): A novel architecture that will allow providing a set of services for free and without any additional infrastructure, by taking advantage of Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications. CaaS uses a hybrid publish/subscribe mechanism where the driver (or subscriber) expresses his interests regarding a service (or a set of services) and where cars having subscribed to the same service will cooperate to provide the subscriber with the necessary information regarding the service he subscribed to, by publishing this information in the network. CaaS structures the network into clusters, and uses Content Based Routing (CBR) for intra-cluster communications and geographic routing for inter-cluster communications.

This research explores vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and their extensive applications, such as enhancing traffic efficiency, infotainment, and passenger safety. Despite significant study, widespread deployment of VANETs has been hindered by security and privacy concerns. Challenges in implementation, including scalability, flexibility, poor connection, and insufficient intelligence, have further complicated VANETs. This study proposes leveraging cloud computing to address these challenges, marking a paradigm shift. Cloud computing, recognised for its cost-efficiency and virtualisation, is integrated with VANETs. The paper details the nomenclature, architecture, models, services, applications, and challenges of VANET-based cloud computing. Three architectures for VANET clouds - vehicular clouds (VCs), vehicles utilising clouds (VuCs), and hybrid vehicular clouds (HVCs) - are discussed in detail. The research provides an overview, delves into related work, and explores VANET cloud computing's architectural frameworks, models, and cloud services. It concludes with insights into future work and a comprehensive conclusion.

DeFog is an innovative microservice placement and load balancing approach for distributed multi-cluster cloud-fog-edge architectures to minimise application response times. The architecture is modelled as a three-layered hierarchy. Each layer consists of one or more clusters of machines, with resource constraints increasing towards lower layers. Applications are modelled as service oriented architectures (SOA) comprising multiple interconnected microservices. As many applications can be run simultaneously, and as the resources of the edge and the fog are limited, choosing among services to run on the edge or the fog is the problem this work is dealing with. DeFog focuses on dynamic (i.e., adaptive) decentralised service placement within each cluster with zero downtime, eliminating the need for coordination between clusters. To assess the effectiveness of DeFog, two realistic applications based on microservices are deployed, and several placement policies are tested to select the one that reduces application latency. Least frequently used (LFU) is the reference service placement strategy. The experimental results reveal that a replacement policy that uses individual microservice latency as the crucial factor affecting service placement outperformed LFU by at least 10% in application response time.

Smart cities research is growing all over the world seeking to understand the effect of smart cities from different angles, domains and countries. The aim of this study is to analyse how the smart city ICTs (e.g., big data analytics, AI, IoT, cloud computing, smart grids, wireless communication, intelligent transportation system, smart building, e-governance, smart health, smart education and cyber security) are related to government. services and society welfare from the perspective of China. This research confirmed a positive correlation of smart city ICTs to e-Govt. Services (e-GS). On the other hand, the research showed a positive influence of smart city ICTs on society's welfare. These findings about smart cities and ICTs inform us how the thought paradigm to smart technologies can cause the improvement of e-GS through economic development, job creation and social welfare. The study offers different applications of the theoretical perspectives and the management perspective which are significant to building a society during recent technologised era.

Drawing on the MOA framework, this study establishes a research model that explains the usage intention of robo-advisors. In the model, three predictors that consist of technology relative advantage, technology herding, and technology familiarity influence usage intention of robo-advisors directly and indirectly via the partial mediation of trust. At the same time, the effects of the three predictors on trust are hypothetically moderated by learning goal orientation and perceived performance risk respectively. Statistical analyses are provided using the data of working professionals from the insurance industry in Taiwan. Based on its empirical findings, this study discusses important theoretical and practical implications.

E-government serves as a vital channel for citizen interactions with the public sector, where user enjoyment is of paramount importance. To date, few studies have comprehensively examined the determinants of citizen enjoyment in e-government. To address this research gap, we administered a survey and gathered data from 363 Australian residents using myGov for tax filing. Our analysis revealed a pronounced discrepancy between reported enjoyment and the intention to continue using the services. Although users demonstrated a strong intent to use e-government services, this intent did not uniformly align with enjoyment. Additionally, informed by self-determination theory, we developed and tested an e-government service enjoyment model to study the impacts of effort expectancy, technophilia, technology humanness, and engagement in fostering user enjoyment. Unexpectedly, the results showed that information privacy concerns, commonly seen as a deterrent in e-government adoption, did not significantly affect enjoyment. Our findings advance the discourse on e-government service improvement.

Physical and social aspects each make up a separate part of servicescape. Together, these make up the servicescape. Although previous research has frequently investigated these aspects separately, the purpose of this study is to simultaneously find out the impact of both aspects within the casual dining restaurants' context. In total, 462 customers in Delhi were polled for this study, and structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data. According to the results, both the social and physical parts of the servicescape have the ability to affect how satisfied customers are, which in turn can affect how they behave in the future.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of electronic service quality subdimensions upon the behavioural and praising intentions of users engaged in internet banking. Using the survey method, 203 responses were collected from users of online banking in Turkey. A partial least square structural equation model was constructed to test both the reliability and validity of the measurement, as well as the structural model. The results indicated that emotional benefits, ease of use, and control subdimensions, which are influenced through graphical quality and layout clarity, have a significant and positive impact upon the behavioural and praising intentions of users of online banking. The study did not find support for the direct effect of layout clarity upon behavioural and praising intentions.

Monetary policy is essential for sustainable growth where effective monetary policies can improve investment, employment, and consumption by fostering a balanced and resilient economy. However, sustainable development is vital for harmonising economic growth, social equity, and environmental preservation. A number of factors have been discussed in the literature that impact sustainable development. However, this study explicitly tries to investigate the nexus among the monetary policy (MP) toward sustainable development (SD) with the mediation of e-banking services (e-BS) and moderation of financial risk management (FRM) from China drawing on stakeholder theory. It discovered a significant connection between monetary policy and sustainable development along with sub-dimensions of SD. Likewise, this study confirmed a positive mediating influence of e-BS between monetary policy and sustainable development. Finally, the study additionally ensured a positive moderation of financial risk between monetary policy and sustainable development, respectively. These outcomes bestow several interesting insights into monetary policy, e-banking services, financial risk management, and sustainable development.

In order to overcome the problems of low efficiency, low user satisfaction and poor customer growth rate under the traditional marketing strategy, this paper studies the innovative strategy of mobile payment business marketing strategy under the internet environment. First of all, study the status quo of mobile payment business marketing in the internet environment, obtain mobile payment business data through questionnaire survey, and analyse the problems in mobile payment business marketing. Secondly, build a user profile of mobile payment business marketing, and classify user attributes, consumption characteristics and user activity through K-means clustering method; Finally, the marketing strategy is innovated from three aspects: product marketing, pricing marketing and channel marketing. The results show that the marketing benefit after the application of this strategy is 19.52 million yuan, the user satisfaction can reach 98.9%, and the customer growth rate can reach 21.3%, improving the marketing benefit of mobile payment business.

Open data is becoming increasingly important in research. While individual researchers are slowlybecoming aware of the value, funding agencies are taking the lead by requiring data be made available, and also by requiring data management plans to ensure the data is available in a useable form. Some journals also require that data be made available. However, in most cases, “available upon request” is considered sufficient. We describe a number of historical examples of data use and discovery, then describe two current test cases at the University of New Mexico. The lessons learned suggest that an instituional data services program needs to not only facilitate fulfilling the mandates of granting agencies but to realize the true value of open data. Librarians and institutional archives should actively collaborate with their researchers. We should also work to find ways to make open data enhance a researchers career. In the long run, better quality data and metadata will result if researchers are engaged and willing participants in the dissemination of their data.

The paper describes the investigations and outcomes of the JISC-funded Kindura project, which is piloting the use of hybrid cloud infrastructure to provide repository-focused services to researchers. The hybrid cloud services integrate external commercial cloud services with internal IT infrastructure, which has been adapted to provide cloud-like interfaces. The system provides services to manage and process research outputs, primarily focusing on research data. These services include both repository services, based on use of the Fedora Commons repository, as well as common services such as preservation operations that are provided by cloud compute services. Kindura is piloting the use of the DuraCloud2, open source software developed by DuraSpace, to provide a common interface to interact with cloud storage and compute providers. A storage broker integrates with DuraCloud to optimise the usage of available resources, taking into account such factors as cost, reliability, security and performance. The development is focused on the requirements of target groups of researchers.

In his oft-quoted seminal paper ‘Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age’ Clifford Lynch (2003) described the Institutional Repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” This paper seeks instead to define the repository service at a more primitive level, without the specialism of being an ‘Institutional Repository’, and looks at how it can viewed as providing a service within appropriate boundaries, and what that could mean for the future development of repositories, our expectations of what repositories should be, and how they could fit into the set of services required to deliver an Institutional Repository service as describe by Lynch.

The paper reviewed the emerging roles of the 21st century librarians, charged with the responsibility to manage repository services across libraries in present-day information technology environment. Librarians need to be trained and empowered with requisite skills and knowledge needed for successful management of the ICT driven repository initiatives that the 21st century demands. Literature was reviewed on the roles and responsibilities of librarians, training needs and opportunities, career path and recruitment of librarians, and community support necessary for effective and efficient implementation and management of repository initiatives. This entails the ability to comprehend trends and change patterns which are essential for providing research focused and user-friendly models in open repository services that are based on thorough analytical understanding of the challenges of emerging trends. To achieve this requires the training and retraining of librarians to reposition them as information specialists in their career path. The role of the library as an integral part of its social environment is to educate the community about the existence of an open repository by building partnership with community-oriented research centres through seminars, workshops, symposium, training, and awareness programmes. The study recommends that librarians should strategize and collaborate with researchers to make open repository an essential research tool.

Aim/Purpose: Bring your own device (BYOD) provides opportunities for both the organization and employees, but the adoption of BYOD also introduces risks. This case study of an organization’s BYOD program identifies key positive and negative influences on the adoption decision. Background: The consumerization of IT introduced the BYOD phenomenon into the enterprise environment. As mobile and Internet technologies improve employees are opting to use their personal devices to access organizational systems to perform their work tasks. Such devices include smartphones, tablets and laptop computers. Methodology: This research uses a case study approach to investigate how business priorities drive the adoption of BYOD and how resulting benefits and risks are realized and managed by the organization. Primary empirical data was collected using semi-structured interviews with 15 senior employees from a large South African financial services organization. Policy documents from the organization were analyzed as secondary data. Contribution: Thematic analysis of the data revealed six major themes: improving employee mobility; improving client service and experience; creating a competitive industry advantage; improving business processes; information security risks; and management best practices. Findings: The themes were analyzed using the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework, showing the key positive and negative influences on the adoption decision. Recommendations for Practitioners: Organizations need to clearly understand the reasons they want to introduce BYOD in their organizations. The conceptual framework can be applied by practitioners in their organizations to achieve their BYOD business objectives. Recommendations for Researchers: BYOD remains an important innovation for organizations with several aspects worthy of further study. The TOE framework presents a suitable lens for analysis, but other models should also be considered. Impact on Society: The findings show that organizations can use BYOD to improve client service, gain competitive advantage, and improve their processes using their digital devices and backend systems. The BYOD trend is thus not likely to go away anytime soon. Future Research: The applicability of findings should be validated across additional contexts. Additional models should also be used.

Aim/Purpose: This study examined learning during the COVID-19 crisis, as perceived by preservice teachers at the time of their academic studies and their student teaching experience. Background: The COVID-19 crisis is unexpected. On one hand, it disrupted learning in all learning frameworks, on the other, it may create a change in learning characteristics even after the end of the crisis. This study examined the pro-ductive, challenging, and thwarting factors that preservice teachers encountered during their studies and in the course of their student teaching during the COVID-19 period, from the perspective of preservice teachers. Methodology: The study involved 287 students studying at teacher training institutions in Israel. The preservice teachers were studying online, and in addition experienced online teaching of students in schools, guided by their own teacher. The study used a mixed method. The questionnaire included closed and open questions. The data were collected in 2020. Contribution: Identifying the affecting factors may deepen the understanding of online learning/teaching and assist in the optimal implementation of online learning. Findings: Online learning experience. We found that some of the lessons at institutions of higher learning were delivered in the format of online lectures. Many pre-service teachers had difficulty sitting in front of a computer for many hours—“Zoom fatigue.” Preservice teachers who had difficulty self-regulating and self-mobilizing for study, experienced accumulating loads, which caused them feelings of stress and anxiety. The word count indicated that the words that appeared most often were “load” and “stress.” Some preservice teachers wrote that collaborating in forums with others made it easier for them. Some suggested diversifying by digital means, incorporating asynchronous units and illustrative films, and easing up on online lectures, as a substitute for face-to-face lectures. Online teaching experience in schools. The preservice teachers' descriptions show that in lessons taught in the format of lectures and communication of content, there were discipline problems and non-learning. According to the preservice teachers, discipline problems stemmed from difficulties concentrating, physical distance, load, and failure to address the students' difficulties. Recommendations for Practitioners: In choosing schools for student teaching, it is recommended to reach an understanding with the school about the online learning policy and organization. It is important to hold synchronous sessions in small groups of 5 to 10 students. The sessions should focus on the mental wellbeing of the students, and on the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Students should be prepared for participation in asynchronous digital lessons, which should be produced by professionals. It should be remembered that the change of medium from face-to-face to online learning also changes the familiar learning environment for all parties and requires modifying the ways of teaching. Recommendations for Researchers: A change in the learning medium also requires a change in the definition of objectives and goals expected of each party—students, teachers, and parents. All parties must learn to view online learning as a method that enables empowerment and the application of 21st century skills. Impact on Society: Teachers' ability to deploy 21st century skills in an online environment de-pends largely on their experience, knowledge, skills, and attitude toward these skills. Future Research: This study examined the issue from the perspective of preservice teachers. It is recommended to examine it also from the perspective of teachers and students.

Aim/Purpose: The aim of this study is to explore the role of service-learning in Information Systems (IS) education. Background: While the use of modern technologies presents many operational benefits, such as the lowering of the costs, it may also aggravate social-economic is-sues. IS professionals should account for these issues as well as exhibit the skills demanded by modern-day employers. Hence, why there is a need for IS educators to adopt a new pedagogy that supports the development of more holistic and socially responsible IS graduates. Methodology: In this qualitative exploratory case study, two IS service-learning courses at a South African university were studied. Interviews, course evaluations, and reflection essays were analyzed to gain insight into the implications that service-learning may have for students. Contribution: This study contributes to IS education research by advancing discussions on the role of service-learning in providing learning outcomes such as the development of important skills in IS, civic-mindedness, and active participation in society. Findings: The findings showed that the courses had different implications for students developing skills that are important in IS and becoming civic-minded due to the variation in their design and implementation. Recommendations for Practitioners: It is recommended that IS educators present their courses in the form of service-learning with a careful selection of readings, projects, and reflection activities. Recommendations for Researchers: IS education researchers are advised to conduct longitudinal studies to gain more insight into the long-term implications that service-learning may have for IS students. Impact on Society: This paper provides insight into how IS students may gain social agency and a better understanding of their role in society. Future Research: It is recommended that future research focus on mediating factors and the implications that service-learning may have for IS students in the long-term.

Aim / Purpose This study examined the perception of the role of tutors in online training of preservice teachers during the COVID period, from the perspective of pre-service teachers and their tutors. Background Because of the COVID pandemic, learning in schools was conducted online, therefore preservice teachers’ practicum also took place online, as did the tutoring process. Methodology The research question was: How did preservice teachers and their tutors perceive the experience of teaching during the COVID period perceived by them; specifically, what was their sense of self-efficacy and satisfaction, and what difficulties did they encounter? This was a quantitative study. The sample included 221 participants comprising 111 tutors and 110 preservice teachers. Data were collected in Israel in 2021. Contribution This study sheds light on the process of online tutoring of preservice teachers by their tutors. Findings The study found that preservice teachers and their tutors perceived the practicum during the COVID period to be helpful, answering preservice teachers’ needs and providing professional assistance in their training. This was more so in the professional aspects of teaching, in the emotional aspects of the tutoring process, and in the process of shaping the preservice teachers’ professional identity, and less so in the organizational aspects of the school. In both groups (tutors and preservice teachers), it emerged that during a complex period of social isolation, maintaining contact reinforces the sense of self-efficacy. Tutors who encountered fewer technical difficulties and thought the tutoring process was enjoyable expressed more satisfaction with the tutoring process. Tutors felt that they were able to get better acquainted personally with the preservice teachers they taught, and vice versa, and preservice teachers were able to get to know their tutors personally. Tutors thought that their interpersonal communication benefitted the preservice teachers, that they listened to their mentees, and understood them. Preservice teachers felt that tutors allowed them to voice their expectations and concerns about their teaching experiences. Recommendations for practitioners One of the main goals of practicum in studies toward a teaching certificate is to prepare the students for their role as teachers. In the online tutoring process, emphasis should be placed on professional aspects (such as instruction and classroom management, identifying points for improvement and setting them as goals and challenges for the future) and on emotional aspects (such as promoting growth and personal development of preservice teachers in the process of shaping their professional identity). Recommendations for researchers One of the findings of the study is that the tutor-mentee relationship should be preserved in remote tutoring. The findings showed a positive correlation between maintaining such contact and high self-efficacy for both tutors and preservice teachers. It was found that tutors who reported high self-efficacy felt that interpersonal communication benefitted the teachers they were guiding. Impact on society Information collected in this study indicates that the tutors made a great effort to provide preservice teachers with meaningful coaching during the COVID period. In certain aspects, the tutoring was more successful and in other aspects less so, given the characteristics of the period, such as social distancing, no attendance of regular classes at school, and so forth. Future research It is recommended to continue investigating the online tutoring process, both from the perspective of preservice teachers and of tutors, to explore in-depth the correlation between self-efficacy and interpersonal communication, with emphasis on feedback between the tutors and preservice teachers.