Academic literature on the topic 'Environmental disclosure indicators'

The ultimate question of most business practitioners and policy makers now is how to reduce corporate negative environmental performance. One of the most effective ways is to help corporations to set the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of their sustainability performance and to report these KPIs to their stakeholders using corporate reporting cycle. To improve the environmental reporting quality, companies generally adopt and follow widely recognized reporting guidelines and third-party assurance standards, thus improving their environmental disclosure quality and trustworthiness in minds of their stakeholders. Over the last two decades a number of global initiatives (e.g. GRI, ISO, DEFRA, AA1000 APS, and ISAE 3000) have been developed for use in sustainability reporting. This chapter, therefore, aims to shed light on these credibility initiatives developed by governmental and non-governmental bodies to improve the quality of environmental reporting and to see the extent to which these credibility initiatives are different or similar.

This chapter discusses the problems of electronic educational resources quality in terms of modern professional competencies shaping in E-Learning Environment. The importance of these problems due to the fact that modern society requires specialists who are not only professionally trained, but also use the “long life learning” strategy in professional self-development. Therefore, electronic resources should provide not only learning conditions for required knowledge and skills, but also have potential for customized information learning strategies generation, for planning personal achievements, self-development and self-realization. There are different evaluation procedures for digital educational resources quality inclusive two main aspects: technical specifications and instructional design. It is proposed to take into account in the evaluation system additional aspect (scorecard), which characterizes the personalization of student's educational activities, organized on the basis of electronic resources interaction. This set includes indicators of electronic educational resources quality, reflecting their ability to promote personal significant results, measured from the perspective of motivation, implementation of personal cognitive (education) requirements, disclosure of creativity and self-actualization. Conventionally, this group can be called “personalization indicators”. Adaptation of such indicators group improves the quality of electronic educational resources by increasing the multiplicity and flexibility of their use in different educational contexts, taking into account the results of student's productive information activity and the diverse of their educational and informational needs and preferences.

Modern identity has been shaped by technology, which has in turn shaped theories in understanding identity. How one communicates who they are to others is given limitless possibilities by the advent of the Internet and computer-mediated environments. Thus, identity theory today must take into account computer-mediated communication theory and research. Such research indicates four ways in which identity is affected by technology. First, researchers have discussed the differences between an individual’s true identity and the virtual identity he or she presents, via self-selected text and images, to an online world. Second, researchers have discussed how the Internet can provide both protective anonymity for those who seek it and cathartic disclosure for those who need it. Third, researchers have discussed ways in which users pursue both reflective virtual lives online and role-play with identities, often multiple identities. Fourth, researchers have conducted experiments that reflect the impact that virtual identity has on the practice of communication and the impact communication has on the presentation of the self.