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This study aims to identify critical online teaching effectiveness factors from instructors’ perspectives and experiences during COVID-19.

This study used a qualitative phenomenology approach. In addition, the research used a snowball sample to identify faculty in the engineering and engineering technology fields with experience in online teaching and learning. All interviews were conducted online by the researchers. The interview questions were based on findings in the current literature. Further, the questions were open-ended.

The analysis identified eight major themes that impact online teaching effectiveness: class recordings; course organization; collaboration; engagement; exam, assignment and quiz grades; games; valuable course content; and student timely feedback and response.

The study was not designed to be generalizable to the entire population of professors who teach online classes but to gain insights from faculty who taught online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Faculty can use the factors identified for online teaching effectiveness to enhance their course design and delivery while teaching online or blended courses.

This research provides insights into factors that impact online teaching effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the power of experimental design as a technique to understand and evaluate the most important factors which influence teaching effectiveness for a postgraduate course in a higher education (HE) context.

The methodology involves the execution of a case study in the form of an experiment in a business school setting. The experiment was carried out with the assistance of over 100 postgraduate students from 26 countries. The data were collected over a two year period (2015 and 2016) from a postgraduate course offered by the same tutor for repeatability reasons.

The key findings of the experiment have clearly indicated that students’ perceptions of teaching effectiveness based on intuition and guesswork are not identical to the outcomes from a simple designed experiment. Moreover, the results of the experiment provided a greater stimulus for the wider applications of the technique to other processes across the case study HE sector.

One of the limitations of the study is that the experiment was conducted for a popular postgraduate course. It would be beneficial to understand the results of the experiment for less popular postgraduate courses in the university in order to drive improvements. Moreover, this research was conducted only for postgraduate courses and the results may vary for undergraduate courses. This would be an interesting study to understand the differences in the factors between undergraduate and postgraduate teaching effectiveness.

The outcome of this experiment would help everyone who is involved in teaching to understand the factors and their influences to improve students’ satisfaction scores during the delivery of teaching.

This paper shows how experimental design as a pure manufacturing technique can be extended to a HE setting.

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) as a process excellence has been widely adopted in both manufacturing and service organizations; however, its application in the public sector has not been widely explored. Is LSS still a myth or reality in our public sector organizations? The purpose of this paper is to make an attempt to debate about the use of LSS and its potential applications in the public sector context.

The initial approach is to critically evaluate the role of LSS in various public sector contexts, followed by showcasing four case studies from four different public sector settings: higher education, police service, public hospital and local government.

LSS methodology can be embraced by all public sector organizations to create efficient and effective processes to provide enhanced customer experience and value at reduced operational costs.

This paper seeks to contribute to and broaden the limited body of evidence of the applicability of LSS to public sector organizations and identifies areas for further research and review.

LSS will continue to grow across many public sector organizations in Europe and other parts of the world over the forthcoming years. However, what will eventually determine if LSS is viewed by public sector organizations as just a passing management fad or not largely depends on the leadership and success of its execution. If LSS is deployed in its true sense across the public sector organizations at a global level, the hard cash savings generated can reach several billions.

The paper yields an immense value to both research scholars and practitioners who are engaged in the introduction of LSS as a business process improvement strategy to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Moreover, this paper makes an attempt to dispel the myth of LSS which have been quite prevalent in many public sector organizations around us today.

This study aims to quantify the multifaceted relationship between lean implementation and occupational health and safety (OHS) performance. Hypotheses based on a set of antecedents (mediating factors) are built and quantitatively tested.

Data were collected through an international survey with responses from more than 20 countries. Partial least square-based structural equation modeling was used to test a theoretical framework derived from literature. Leading indicators (formative indices) were used to evaluate the four antecedents of OHS performance (mediating factors).

All the identified antecedents show a significant mediating role. Antecedents related to the working environment and organizational factors have the strongest mediating effect. Results support the importance of using OHS leading indicators to appropriately measure the impact of lean implementation on workers’ health and safety.

The proposed OHS leading indicators connecting lean practices to OHS performance antecedents are only explored in this study. Therefore, to establish a comprehensive, validated and practically usable set of leading indicators, further research is needed.

As there are some synergistic and trade-off relationships between lean and safety, the findings of this study will enable managers and organizations to leverage the positive effects of lean implementation on workers’ health and safety and mitigate the negative effects.

Several prior studies investigated the multifaceted link between lean and OHS; however, this is the first study that tested direct and mediated influence by defining a coherent set of antecedents. The results justify and strongly support the adoption of OHS leading indicators to measure the impact of lean implementation on OHS performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the voice of the customer, key performance indicators, critical to quality characteristics, critical success factors, and commonly used tools and techniques for deploying the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) strategy in Indian private hospitals, with special attention to the medical records.

The study utilizes the action research methodology to obtain a greater understanding of the use of LSS in the Indian healthcare sector. Multiple case studies were designed and successfully deployed to understand and ascertain challenges in LSS implementation. Five case studies were carried out in the Medical Records Departments (MRD) of four private hospitals in India.

Patients perceive that waiting in queue harms their health, which can be rectified by addressing the cycle time of the system. The research also found that effective leadership, availability of data, involvement of cross-functional team and effective communication are critical to the success of LSS projects. In addition, control charts, cause and effect diagram, 5S, gemba, two-sample t-test, standardization, waste analysis and value stream mapping are some of the common tools used to improve healthcare systems.

The research was restricted to studying the impact of LSS on the workflow and resource consumption of the MRD in Indian allopathic hospitals only. The validity of the results can be improved by including more hospitals and more case studies from the healthcare sector in different countries.

The findings will enable researchers, academicians and practitioners to incorporate the results of the study in LSS implementation within the healthcare system to increase the likelihood of successful deployment. This will provide greater stimulus across other departments in the hospital sector for wider and broader application of LSS for creating and sustaining process improvements.

This paper is one of seven in this volume that aims to elaborate different approaches to quality improvement in education. It delineates a methodology called Six Sigma.

The paper presents the origins, theoretical foundations, core principles and a case study demonstrating an application of Six Sigma in a school-community partnership in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The core principles underlying the approach are decreasing variability or unreliability in organizational work processes, eliminate waste or activity that does not add value to desired outcomes, identify defects and decrease their incidence, reduce the cost of work processes, and improve beneficiary/client satisfaction levels. The steps in this statistics-dependent method are design, measure, analyze, improve and control.

Few theoretical treatments and demonstration cases are currently available on commonly used models of quality improvement that might have potential value in improving education systems internationally. This paper fills this gap by elucidating one promising approach. The paper also derives value as it permits a comparison of the Six Sigma approach with other quality improvement approaches treated in this volume.

Teaching effectiveness is essential to student learning, engagement and success. This study aims to identify the perceived teaching effectiveness attributes from the student’s perspective through a pilot study.

A comprehensive literature review identified 6 demographic and 25 teaching effectiveness characteristics. The Kano model was used to gather and analyze the student’s voices. The research validated the survey instrument using Cronbach’s alpha to ensure internal consistency and Chi-square goodness of fit to test the data distribution. Differences in response patterns were analyzed using Fisher’s exact test. Furthermore, the magnitude of the effect between the teaching effectiveness attributes was determined using Cramer’s V test.

This study determined that students perceived 19 attributes as one-dimensional, 3 as indifferent, 2 as attractive and 1 as one-dimensional and attractive. The analysis found differences in response patterns concerning readings and materials, grading rubrics to set assignment expectations and group/teamwork on projects.

As a pilot study, the sample size was small. Additional research should validate the survey using a larger sample. While the study results are specific to the college surveyed, other educators can use the methodology to identify the attributes important to their students.

Categorizing attributes based on the student’s voice enables instructors to focus on attributes that will improve the learning experience.

This research provides a comprehensive methodology for identifying critical teaching effectiveness attributes from the student’s perspective.

In order to provide access to care in a timely manner, it is necessary to effectively manage the allocation of limited resources. such as beds. Bed management is a key to the effective delivery of high quality and low-cost healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to develop a discrete event simulation to assist in planning and staff scheduling decisions.

A discrete event simulation model was developed for a hospital system to analyze admissions, patient transfer, length of stay (LOS), waiting time and queue time. The hospital system contained 50 beds and four departments. The data used to construct the model were from five years of patient records and contained information on 23,019 patients. Each department’s performance measures were taken into consideration separately to understand and quantify the behavior of departments individually, and the hospital system as a whole. Several scenarios were analyzed to determine the impact on reducing the number of patients waiting in queue, waiting time and LOS of patients.

Using the simulation model, it was determined that reducing the bed turnover time by 1 h resulted in a statistically significant reduction in patient wait time in queue. Further, reducing the average LOS by 10 h results in statistically significant reductions in the average patient wait time and average patient queue. A comparative analysis of department also showed considerable improvements in average wait time, average number of patients in queue and average LOS with the addition of two beds.

This research highlights the applicability of simulation in healthcare. Through data that are often readily available in bed management tracking systems, the operational behavior of a hospital can be modeled, which enables hospital management to test the impact of changes without cost and risk.

The purpose of the article is to present the results of a critical literature review (CLR) on Design of experiments (DoE) in the service industry.

A critical review of existing literature review across various databases including Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and Emerald Insight were searched for the identification of relevant papers. The authors searched relevant journal articles for a time period of 25 years (1994–2019).

A total of 29 industry case studies of DoE applications were identified spanning healthcare, retail, logistics, education, marketing, after sales and catering business. The industrial experimentation strategies adopted by the case study organisations were screening, factorial designs, Taguchi, response surface method and split-plot. It was apparent that there are only a handful number of papers showing the applications of DoE across the service sector and this motivates for pursuing further research into this topic by the authors.

The findings of the study can be very useful for middle and senior managers to understand the benefits of implementing this powerful technique for increased understanding of service processes, as well as for optimising service performance. Moreover, the paper presents some of the fundamental challenges, as well as skills needed for the successful application of DoE.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first CLR on DoE and its applications in the service sector. The findings of the study can be beneficial to both academic and industrial communities to understand some of the challenges and fundamental gaps which need to be tackled in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the fundamental challenges and critical success factors in the development of a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) initiative within a UK higher education institute (HEI). The paper also illustrates examples of the types of projects completed and share some of the key lessons learned as part of the LSS journey.

The authors have initially carried out an extensive literature review on the application of LSS in higher education to understand the existing body of work carried out by other scholars in the field. This is followed by presenting a case study explaining how a HEI in the UK has embarked on its LSS journey as a process excellence methodology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of core and supporting business processes.

There has been a clear lack of support and commitment from senior management in the sustainability of LSS within the case study organization. There was a general lack of understanding of the benefits of LSS in the higher education context and there is a lack of knowledge on the use of LSS tools for tackling process efficiency and effectiveness problems across the case study organization. Although a number of LSS projects were executed across finance, administrative, and human resources, as well as IT and library services, no projects were carried out for improving academic processes such as teaching effectiveness.

As the case study is limited to one higher education institution (HEI), the findings of the study cannot be broadly generalized. Moreover, the paper does not report the findings of any strategic projects as most projects were carried out at the operational level.

This is possibly one of the first studies reporting project examples of LSS in a HEI. The results of the study can also be used to benchmark with similar studies in other HEIs to understand the impact of certain management practices of LSS.