Search results

The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytic hierarchy planning-based framework to establish criteria weights and to develop a school performance system commonly called school inspections.

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model uses pairwise comparisons and a measurement scale to generate the weights for the criteria. The validity of the approach is confirmed by comparing the outputs of school inspection and the outputs of the model in a sample of schools.

The framework proposed enables school management to address several issues pertaining to its competitive advantage with other schools, the two most important being establishing its performance ranking in the marketplace and identifying the service elements that most require improvement. This study develops a cohesive approach to identify which quality attributes or dimensions require attention.

For school inspections, the data collection and computational problems would increase with the increase in the number of criteria and sub-criteria, as well as the number of schools considered in the selection. Although the range of reported AHP applications is extensive in many disciplines, examples in school quality and inspection remain still rare; as a result, this study could not compare its results with other AHP applications in school inspection or assessment.

The AHP method has the distinct advantage that it decomposes a decision problem into its constituent parts and builds hierarchies of criteria. AHP enables assessors to capture both subjective and objective evaluation measures of school quality. By providing a useful mechanism for assessing the consistency of the evaluation measures and alternatives, the AHP reduces bias in decision making.

The AHP model also provides a more systematic evaluation of a given school’s qualitative performance criteria. The proposed AHP model is attractive to assessors and decision makers because its pairwise comparison procedure enables them to offer a relative (rather than absolute) individual criterion assessment on those qualitative factors.

The AHP model could become a sustainable component of overall school system quality improvement by maturing over time. The AHP annual scores could be used as realistic and measureable gauges for measuring school improvement.

This study assesses the impact of innovation diffusion theory (IDT), technology readiness index (TRI) and technology acceptance model (TAM) on the actual use of smart learning. This impact also accounts for the country-digital culture by moderating the effects of resistance to change (RTC) and mediating the role of attitude.

The authors gather data from 301 respondents from various academic institutions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by operationalizing established theoretical constructs. The authors adopt a covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) approach.

The results reveal that IDT and TRI significantly and positively affect attitudes toward implementing smart learning. Besides, the attitude fully mediates the relationship between IDT, TRI constructs and behavioral intention (BI). Moreover, this study proves that RTC plays a major role in converging BI to place smart learning into actual use.

The major limitation of the authors' work is that this work employs cross-sectional data from UAE only, and the data were gathered during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The stakeholders and administrators in government can benefit from the study findings to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the implementation of smart learning, which will contribute to achieving stakeholders and administrators' strategic objectives.

The originality of this work stems from the incorporation of IDT, TRI and TAM constructs in the case of smart learning in UAE in post-COVID-19 scenarios.