Resilient sustainable investment in digital education technology: A stakeholder-centric decision support model under uncertainty

Abstract

Investment in education technology (EdTech) is a complex decision problem for universities during the post-Covid era. With the objective to assess the quality and adoptability of education supply chain, a novel analyt-ical evaluation model approach is proposed, based on quality function deployment and combinative distance-based assessment. To deal with uncertainty in the evaluation process, fuzzy theory is integrated into the model. To establish the house of quality matrix, technology-based stakeholders' requirements were identified and classified in four dimensions: economic and financial, technology adoption, sustainability, competencies. Moreover, nine supplier criteria were assumed. Based on expert evaluations, the results suggest that financial credit and supplier collaboration are the most prominent attributes to evaluate suppliers, while environmental commitment is sorted as the least important criterion. The results reveal that the three dominant suppliers, which provide the best response to the identified criteria, are providers of cloud service technology.