Abstract:

Quality Assurance (QA) in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) requires considerable resources. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), HEIs are required for accreditation purposes, to adhere to 8 National Centre for Academic Accreditation and Assessment (NCAAA) standards and 23 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used to measure HEI performance of an institutions. These NCAAA standards can be benchmarked against International standards such as the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) in the United States of America, the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) and the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA). Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards can provide a useful tool to monitor quality assurance performance in HEIs as they provide timely performance tracking mechanisms. This paper aims to show the process of developing a Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard for monitoring quality in HEIs. The development process shows how HEIs can utilise a Holistic Framework for Monitoring Quality in Higher Education Institutions using Business Intelligence dashboards (HF-HEQ-BI) for the purpose of developing a BI dashboard for monitoring quality. The presented dashboard reflects the main five pillars of quality monitoring using BI dashboards and the factors that are required to be monitored for quality assurance. Social Media analytics are seen to be important for measuring service quality in HEIs. The developed dashboard presents social media analytics and supports sentiment analysis of data coming from social media channels and provides a useful teaching and learning case study.

Keywords:

Business Intelligence, Quality Assurance (QA), Accreditation, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Dashboards, Sentiment Analysis.