Guest editorial: Addressing technological innovations, health events, and social needs to achieve quality in education Free

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are complex service organizations with multiple stakeholders (e.g. students, parents, faculty, administrative personnel and the community); each of them has 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; Anthony and Antony, 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, such 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) or 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 service organizations require 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 of the challenge (e.g. technological, social and health), these disruptive times are impacting the service quality perception that customers and stakeholders receive 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 service quality in education institutions. These practices could be conducted at different levels, for example, the whole institution or a single course.

This special issue had an extraordinary response from academics and practitioners, addressing four main topics in 22 publications: innovative teaching and learning methods, applications of artificial intelligence (AI), applications of Industry 5.0 (I5) technologies and tools and challenges and continuous improvement in education (see Table 1).

From the Guest Editors' perspective, the special issue successfully achieved its objective by bringing together manuscripts from authors across different countries. These contributions employed both qualitative and quantitative research methods – such as surveys, case studies and bibliometric analyses – and enriched the body of knowledge for both scholars and practitioners, ultimately advancing quality in higher education.