Fermatean Fuzzy DEMATEL and MMDE Algorithm for Modelling the Barriers of Implementing Education 4.0: Insights from the Philippines

Abstract

Technological transitions in the education sector of developing economies are faced with a range of barriers, involving resource scarcity, socio-cultural concerns, and issues related to management and policy. The popularity of Industry 4.0 has prompted Education 4.0 (EDUC4), an approach to learning that involves transformation using advanced technologies. While a recent work reported a comprehensive list of barriers to EDUC4 implementation, particularly in developing economies, further analysis to identify those priority barriers remains a gap. Thus, this work addresses this gap by introducing a novel methodological extension of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method following the integration of Fermatean fuzzy sets (FFS). The FFS, compared to other fuzzy environments, could capture higher levels of uncertainties that are associated when eliciting judgments necessary for the DEMATEL. Such integration is aided by the maximum mean de-entropy (MMDE) algorithm, which analytically determines the threshold value crucial for constructing the prominence-relation map of the DEMATEL. Following its application in evaluating the implementation of EDUC4 in Philippine universities, the critical barriers are the lack of training resources, costs, insufficiency of available technologies, skills gap of human resources, knowledge gap, and the complexity of the learning platforms. Among this set, barriers related to cost and lack of training resources are deemed the most prominent ones. The statistical test on the impact of addressing the two prominent barriers shows that addressing the barrier related to costs yields statistically more favorable results regarding the mitigation of other EDUC4 implementation barriers. Although these insights may contain idiosyncrasies, they can serve as starting points of discussion in other relevant developing economies. These methodological and practical contributions advance the development of analytical tools under uncertainty that can handle pressing problems such as the EDUC4 implementation.

Evaluating E-Teaching Adoption Criteria for Indian Educational Organizations Using Fuzzy Delphi-TOPSIS Approach

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“…The defuzzification process, which is based on determining the maximum and minimum fuzzy numbers, was considered to diffusely transform the fuzzy set into crisp values. In addition, this process of defuzzification is more effective in arriving at crisp values compared with the centroid approach [35].…”

A Rough-Fermatean DEMATEL Approach for Sustainable Development Evaluation for the Manufacturing Industry

“…Giri et al [ 58 ] proposed Pythagorean DEMATEL to select the most appropriate supplier in sustainable supply chain management. Gonzales et al [ 59 ] developed Fermatean DEMATEL and maximum mean de-entropy algorithm to analyze the barriers of implementing education 4.0. In addition, there are several hybrid models.…”

Causality analytics among key factors for green economy practices: Implications for sustainable development goals

“…FFS is preferred over other fuzzy systems (intuitionistic and Pythagorean) as it is more flexible, efficient, and capable of dealing with uncertainties (Liu et al, 2019). FFS-DEMATEL has been used in many earlier applications such as the implementation of education 4.0 (Gonzales et al, 2022) and urban transport planning (Simić et al, 2022).…”