Addressing Technological Innovations, Health Events, and Social Needs to Achieve Quality in Education

Introduction

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are complex service organizations with multiple stakeholders (e.g., students, parents, faculty, administrative personnel, and the community); each of them with a distinct meaning of quality (Harvey and Green, 1993; Choudhury, 2015; Li et al., 2019).  Additionally, almost every process in HEIs involves human interaction, which increases the probability of a negative service quality experience (Li et al., 2019), impacting stakeholders' satisfaction and loyalty. (Farahmandian et al., 2013; Ali et al., 2016).  Therefore, HEIs have been conducting successful quality management systems, continuous improvement projects and operational excellence models to improve their business and process metrics (Dahlgaard et al., 1995; Gonzalez Aleu et al., 2021; Antony and Anthony, 2022).  However, these actions could not be enough during these disruptive times.

HEIs, like many other institutions, are living in disruptive times due to technological progress, health (physical and mental) events, and community volatile demands, where change adaptation and innovation are new game rules. From a technological progress point of view, students and faculties have every time more tools in their hands, as ChatGPT.  Also, HEIs are using different aspects of Industry 4.0 to improve their internal processes, such as digital transformation and data analytics.  After the COVID-19 pandemic, several health problems arose in HEI stakeholders (Camilleri, 2021).  Medical departments were created to prevent and help people with physical and mental needs.  Additionally, before the COVID-19 pandemic, academic organizations were not prepared for remote teaching systems (Daniel, 2020), origin problems such as students' knowledge backwardness, students' lack of motivation, faculty lack of online pedagogy models, staff employees working online, and lack of process automatization.  Now, several HEIs built new business models to address the online education niche, where the use of interactive technology should be a norm (Camilleri, 2021).  Lastly, manufacturing and services organization requires professionals with several soft and hard outcomes, they are outsourcing their training needs and have to address more challenging safety and environmental legal requirements.  Independently to the challenge (e.g., technological, social, health) this disruptive times are impact in the service quality perception that customers and stakeholders received from education institutions (Abbas, 2020).

Therefore, the purpose of this special issue is to collect HEIs and organizational best practices to address technological innovations, health, or community challenges that impact in service quality in education institutions. These practices could be conducted at different levels, for example, whole institution or a single course.  

List of topic areas

• The impact of Artificial Intelligence (e.g., ChatGPT) on students' performance and ethics.
• The impact of pedagogical models (e.g., gamification, mindfulness, business simulations) on students' engagement, performance, and motivation.
• The role of the student branch (or chapters) and associations in developing soft and hard skills.
• Continuous improvement project (e.g., SCRUM, Kaizen events, Kaizen teams, Improvement Kata, Lean Six Sigma) applications to improve HEIs' internal processes to respond to technological, health or community needs.
• Addressing student and staff diversity in HEIs.
• The role of HEIs as facilitators in the continuous improvement of students' lives.
• How organizations, different than HEIs, are adapting their in-house training programs to address the challenges from these disruptive times.
• The application of Kaizen methodologies or techniques to improve students' mindfulness during disruptive times.
• Quality 4.0 in education.

Submissions Information

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Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to "Please select the issue you are submitting to". 

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

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Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st August, 2024

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 30th November, 2024 

Email for submissions: [email protected]