How Ready Is Higher Education for Quality 4.0 Transformation according to the LNS Research Framework?

Abstract

The world is evolving, and it has transformed from the industrial age to the era of connected and intelligent products in both organizations and competition. The advances in technology in the last decade have led to the introduction of a new term called Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution and that has led to the emergence of the term Quality 4.0. Quality 4.0 is the digitalization of traditional quality approaches and the focus on the use of digital tools to improve an organization’s ability to meet customers’ requirements with high quality. The purpose of this paper is to assess the environments of higher education institutions (HEIs) against the 11 axes of LNS Research Quality 4.0 framework and provide insights about their readiness for Quality 4.0 transformation. The framework helps the organizations digitalize their traditional quality practices and transform to Quality 4.0 through exploring the traditional quality—Quality 4.0 continuum of tools and/or concepts related to each axis so they can assess their transformation efforts accordingly. This paper uses these continuums to identify the quality implementation efforts conducted by HEIs through analyzing the continuums’ related practices adopted within their environments and find out what should be done to get to the full transformation to Quality 4.0 within the higher education field. The study shows the HEIs potential of adopting the Quality 4.0 tools and techniques of varies axes of the framework while revealing a limited adoption of most of them in the current times. This is due to several challenges the most impacting of which is having fragmented processes together with fragmented data systems and sources. The study is concluded with a proposed roadmap to assist HEIs to get the best out their efforts in the Quality 4.0 transformation process.

Applications of Blockchain Technology to Higher Education Arena: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Figure 4 can be large even if there is no direct relationship between the positions. It is evident that the main authors in this analysis were Alzahrani et al [ 1 ] and Ocheja et al [ 22 ] in terms of annual correlation.…”

“…In addition, Ali et al [ 26 ] introduced blockchain model to support easy application for certificates. Alzahrani et al [ 1 ] indicated the limited blockchain adoption in support of IES quality. Moreover, Panachev et al [ 9 ] investigated the use of blockchain and game approach in higher education institutions.…”

“…The global evolution has transformed the industrial era into the connected era, with smart products, especially in contemporary organizations [ 1 ]. In addition, the advent of the Bitcoin system brought another boom on the Internet, enabling the development of applications in various economic sectors using Blockchain systems [ 2 ].…”

“…Consequently, Castro et al [ 5 ] conducted a study of blockchain and diploma in the Scopus database. In addition, Alzahrani et al [ 1 ] identified articles related to the literature on blockchain and higher education for the transformation of quality 4.0.…”

Incremental processing of polymer materials using the INDUSTRY 4.0 network structure

“…Significant moment for the development of communication support systems for solutions based on incremental technologies was the emergence of cloud computing. These technologies have revolutionized many areas of our life [30][31][32], and thus also influenced the area related to 3D printing. Resource virtualization ensured scalability of design and manufacturing systems, and thus it was possible to increase the efficiency of use, reduce costs and extend cooperation in both B2B and B2C relations [9,[33][34][35].…”