Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic started a new era in understanding the topic of resilience and adaptability. The human society has not faced such a widespread global challenge until now. This paper aims to address a context change influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, using a case study in high education. While the character of the issues emerging is the same as in any other domain, in high education, the principles and consequences can be more directly studied and analyzed.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper describes a framework to evaluate how the context of the tertiary education service has been disrupted and the influence on the adherence of the students to the educational process, via primary quantitative data collection. This paper tackles the problem of distinguishing the change in context and context change and the possibility of system reconfiguration.
Findings
To properly face the evolving conditions induced by the pandemic, the education service system must be aligned to the imposed emergency situations, trying to “find” where the changes have emerged, i.e. what kind of reconfiguration is, whether it appears in the goals or in the service system itself. Furthermore, this study discusses how the findings can be valuable and applied to situations beyond the pandemic, in other cases of context disruption to highlight how general the service activities are within our reconfiguration approach.
Originality/value
From a theoretical point of view, this work is in line with main assumptions of system thinking, by confirming several insights of service systems’ behavior, even in a logic of B2B interactions (from the offer side); first in terms of openness and adaptation, in addition to readiness to change and – when and how – this change can occur. From a practical point of view, this paper’s contribution is directed toward achieving the more successful change management process, as reached together by motivated partners working hard for a common final goal. Realizing that the pandemic has brought a completely new context of education, managers should focus now on monitoring all aspects of the education business, not only directly affected projects and processes.
The appearance of the COVID disruption has proved the need for rapid innovations in education, with new value proposition(s) able to capture the new activities involving value co-creation in the education service systems. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for skills building in collaborative TVET online communities that integrates the Collaborative Knowledge Sharing Environment (CKSEnv), an ontology-based collaborative development of knowledge-intensive services, as a possible main driver for value co-creation amongst actors in the after-pandemic TVET education. CKSEnv’s usability and usefulness in achieving its goals is evaluated. Quantitative and qualitative data collected through interviews have revealed respondents’ interest in topics such as the sustainability, usefulness, usability, value co-creation, and technical functionality of the proposed development. Both the utility and simplicity proved to have the most significant impact on CKSEnv adoption and usage. A new service design artifact is created, the smart service model canvas in the TVET online communities, to explain the new value co-creation process, which is able to fill gaps in describing the role of ICT in supporting the TVET training cycle. This research may ground further explorations related to the development of TVET online communities, while the CKSEnv is still in the evaluation stage. The practical implications of this study express the need for new value co-creation processes with specific activities that use technology-driven innovations, able to establish such newly created value, through smart educational services.
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