Application of the Kano Model for a Better Understanding of Customer Requirements in Higher Education—A Pilot Study

Application of Kano model for optimizing the training system among nursing internship students: a mixed-method Egyptian study

BACKGROUND

Clinical experience is an important component of nursing education because it translates students' knowledge into practice, which serves as the cornerstone of nursing practice in health care delivery.

PURPOSE

The study aims to explore the quality attributes required for optimizing the training system of nursing internship students using Kano model.

METHODS

A concurrent exploratory sequential triangulation design was used for mixed-methods research. A total of 295 nursing internship students (Target Population) were recruited (whole-population sampling) from the study settings in Egypt. Of them, 280 (97.2%) agreed to participate in the study and completed the interview and the self-administered questionnaire. Data collection was done over 6 months from February to August, 2022. Inferential statistics and thematic data analysis were used to analyze the results.

RESULTS

Findings revealed that there were 35 fundamental attributes required for high-quality nursing students' internship training. Kano model was used to categorize and prioritize the 35 quality attributes. Kano analysis revealed that 22 attributes were categorized as "attractive" and 11 attributes were as categorized as "must be" and two were indifferent attributes.

CONCLUSION

Incorporating the voice of nurse interns during their training is the key to providing efficient and high-quality internship training experience. It could give realistic impressions about the drawbacks of training and proposed solutions.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE STUDY

Nurse managers and educators in clinical settings and educational institutions should put much emphasis on the training attributes and pillars to ensure that nursing internship students are mastering the skills of competent alumni. Provision of conducive training environment that fulfill the basic needs of internship students to maintain passion for learning as well as commitment of internship students to nursing profession will improve the satisfaction level and quality of education, training, and practice. Also, incorporating internship students support system with motivation strategies are helpful tools to maintain exemplary performance of internship students during the training period.

Synthesis of strategies in post-COVID-19 public sector supply chains under an intuitionistic fuzzy environment

Entities in public sector supply chains (SCs) often operate independently despite having interdependent objectives. Such a fragmented operational design poses several problems magnified by the presence of necessary public health measures fueled by COVID-19. This work contributes to the domain literature by introducing an overarching framework for synthesizing strategies in public sector SCs. The underlying component is the translation of information from the upstream to the downstream entities of the SCs, which is carried out by a Kano-enhanced quality function deployment. The proposed framework introduces intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) decision maps with the aid of the full consistency method to incorporate inherent interrelationships among strategies in the translation agenda. Under an IF environment that better captures judgment uncertainties, an actual case study of a multi-level public sector SC motivated by a government-funded project under the COVID-19 pandemic is demonstrated in this work. Findings of the case suggest that the government prioritizes meeting all project objectives. This requirement is reflected in the downstream SC. The project planning entity focuses on creating an overarching plan of operations, material request entity on complying with government procurement protocols, and maintaining public health and safety in operations for the procurement entity. Results show the effective synthesis of strategies across the SC, ensuring SC integration and collaboration. The case study demonstrates that maintaining public health and safety is a significant component of post-COVID-19 public sector SCs. Several practical insights on the synthesis of public sector SC strategies are also provided in this work.

The satisfaction of the undergraduate nursing classroom teaching quality based on the Kano model in China

Objectives

To investigate the satisfaction of the undergraduate nursing classroom teaching quality based on the Kano model and provide a reference for improving the overall quality of educational services.

Methods

A total of 621 sophomores and juniors of nursing at Hubei University of Medicine were selected to conduct questionnaires based on the Kano model using convenient sampling.

Results

The 16 items are all a one-dimensional factor. The satisfaction and importance are 0.77 to 0.86 and -0.58 to -0.80, respectively. In the quadrant analysis chart, there are four items in the dominant area, three items for improvement, three in the observation area, and six in the retention area.

Conclusion

Analyzing the satisfaction of nursing undergraduates' classroom teaching quality can help us effectively understand the intrinsic needs of students and improve the overall quality of nursing undergraduates' curriculum teaching services.

Educational Systematized Design Thinking Platform—Case of Study: Bus Stop

Due to the pandemic caused by the SARSCoV-2 virus, higher education institutions need to develop innovations to accelerate change adaptation and give way to new teaching–learning processes. Since design thinking is currently used in an inspirational way to find solutions to problems, this work presents the design of an Educational Systematized Design Thinking (ESDT) methodology based on a hybrid approach of Kano’s model and the minimum value product creation. Moreover, its implementation is carried out to generate the so-called ESDT platform, which is a tool that students, teachers, and educational researchers can use to work remotely. A case study to respond to a fundamental design problem in the community of a group of architecture students is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed work.

Exploring Attractive Quality Requirements for Short Food Supply Chain Digital Platforms

Perceptions towards unsustainable supply chain practices in global, mainstream food systems are motivating a shift towards short food supply chains. Short food supply chains are developed to remove the physical and social distances between producer and consumer. Advances in digital technologies offer promise for short food supply chains, including platforms that can enable real-time data flow, create visibility, and support sustainable practices. This research aims to prioritise attractive quality requirements of short food supply chain digital platforms. The methodology consists of a literature review and Kano analysis for requirements prioritisation. The results show that the requirements span across the four Kano categories, attractive quality encompassing the largest number of requirements. The attractive quality requirements identified offer increased levels of satisfaction when present and have limited negative impact when missing. Therefore, they are considered exciting for potential users of a system. The limitations of the research and areas of future work are presented.

Assessing the Expectations and Perceptions of Nursing Students regarding the Educational Services in a School of Nursing and Midwifery Based on the SERVQUAL and Kano Models: A Case Study

This study determined the gap between student expectations and perceptions to achieve a relatively accurate description of student satisfaction. Student expectations and perceptions regarding educational services across a number of different dimensions were evaluated using SERVQUAL model, and the nature of each educational factor was determined using the Kano model. Three characteristics of 30 educational services indicators were placed in the cluster of students' basic needs, 26 characteristics were placed in the performance and one-dimensional needs cluster, and one characteristic was placed in the neutral needs cluster. No characteristics were put in the cluster concerning the motivational needs of students.

A Pro-Environmental Method of Sample Size Determination to Predict the Quality Level of Products Considering Current Customers’ Expectations

The main factor that conditions the success of organizations is the development of products oriented toward customer satisfaction. An additional attribute of organizations is the use of sustainable development rules. The use of these rules and the simultaneous desire to create high-quality products encourage organizations to apply different methods to, for example, eliminate waste. This study aimed to develop a method to determine the research sample size required to predict a product’s quality level, taking into account current customers’ expectations. This method was developed by modifying a procedure to determine the research sample size as part of the calculated estimator of the mean value in the general population. Based on the concept of product sustainability development, the goal of the developed method was to determine the number of potential customers (respondents) needed to provide product requirements, which were then processed and used to predict the quality level of the product. This method was applied to simultaneously test a number of hypotheses, determine the test power, and detect statistically significant differences for several relationships of the sample sizes and the test power. This was achieved using universal hypotheses and the popular alternative-punctual (MAP) method. Testing of the proposed method showed that it was able to predict the quality level of products based on current expectations of customers.