How Stakeholders’ Data Literacy Contributes to Quality in Higher Education: A Goal-Oriented Analysis

Abstract

Quality is a complex concept in higher education due to its value-laden nature, that is, different people mean different things. There are five notions of quality in higher education: quality as fitness for purpose, quality as excellence, quality as cost-effectiveness, quality as consistency, and quality as transformation. In the era of big data, most higher education data have not been transformed into actionable insights than other fields such as business intelligence in the companies. Quality is the lifeline of higher education in the universal stage of higher education development. Based on the five notions of quality, this paper aims to discuss how the five notions of quality relate to each other, who the key stakeholders are for each notion of quality, and how their data literacy will impact the quality of higher education.