Education 4.0 (EDUC4) was driven by the onset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to meet labor market requirements resulting from learning that is customized, flexible, accessible, and skills-based. As the concept of EDUC4 develops popularity in the education and innovation research domains, various challenges about its implementation have emerged, especially in developing economies. Thus, there is a need to investigate the existing barriers to EDUC4 implementation. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement, a systematic literature review of journal articles in the Scopus database was conducted. Of the 299 journal articles generated from the initial search on Scopus, 30 met the inclusion criteria and were included in the review. The content analysis yielded 12 barriers which include cybersecurity threat, costly, skills gap of human capital, apprehensive stakeholders, lack of training resources, lack of collaboration, knowledge gap for the customization of curriculum design, insufficient available technologies, health issues, time constraint for material preparation, complexity of learning platforms, and insufficient foundation of basic education. They were then associated with seven themes for better operationalization in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): (1) human resources, (2) infrastructure, (3) financial, (4) linkages, (5) educational management, (6) learners, and (7) health and environment. Finally, a theoretical predictive model was constructed to present the causal relationships in modeling the problems associated with implementing EDUC4. The insights generated from this work offer both theoretical and practical perspectives for stakeholders of HEIs in the implementation of EDUC4 in developing economies.

Technological transitions in the education sector of developing economies are faced with a range of barriers, involving resource scarcity, socio-cultural concerns, and issues related to management and policy. The popularity of Industry 4.0 has prompted Education 4.0 (EDUC4), an approach to learning that involves transformation using advanced technologies. While a recent work reported a comprehensive list of barriers to EDUC4 implementation, particularly in developing economies, further analysis to identify those priority barriers remains a gap. Thus, this work addresses this gap by introducing a novel methodological extension of the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method following the integration of Fermatean fuzzy sets (FFS). The FFS, compared to other fuzzy environments, could capture higher levels of uncertainties that are associated when eliciting judgments necessary for the DEMATEL. Such integration is aided by the maximum mean de-entropy (MMDE) algorithm, which analytically determines the threshold value crucial for constructing the prominence-relation map of the DEMATEL. Following its application in evaluating the implementation of EDUC4 in Philippine universities, the critical barriers are the lack of training resources, costs, insufficiency of available technologies, skills gap of human resources, knowledge gap, and the complexity of the learning platforms. Among this set, barriers related to cost and lack of training resources are deemed the most prominent ones. The statistical test on the impact of addressing the two prominent barriers shows that addressing the barrier related to costs yields statistically more favorable results regarding the mitigation of other EDUC4 implementation barriers. Although these insights may contain idiosyncrasies, they can serve as starting points of discussion in other relevant developing economies. These methodological and practical contributions advance the development of analytical tools under uncertainty that can handle pressing problems such as the EDUC4 implementation.

This study explored how teachers' peer support climate (PSC) and supervisory support climate (SSC) were related to teacher self-efficacy (TSE), teacher job satisfaction (TJS), teacher emotional exhaustion (TEE), and motivation to quit the teaching profession (MQTP) among teachers in the Philippines. Participants were 457 teachers in the Central Visayas Region. Structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that MQTP varies as to self-efficacy, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. Responses among all constructs do not vary among novice and experienced teachers except on TJS. The findings of the research advocate the proposed model. The model can guide future researchers in developing countries like the Philippines to explain teachers’ attrition caused by social support, efficacy factors, burnout, and job satisfaction.

This work defines various stakeholder roles (or strategies) to overcome the barriers to implementing Education 4.0 (EDUC4), which were recently identified in the domain literature. The stakeholder roles are evaluated against these barriers, and such evaluation is structured as a multicriteria sorting problem. To this end, an integrated entropy‐based CRITIC‐CODAS‐SORT under a Fermatean fuzzy (FF) environment addresses epistemic uncertainties inherent in decision‐making. The FF CRITIC assigns the priority weights of the barriers, while the FF CODAS‐SORT determines the high‐priority stakeholder roles. A case of an HEI evaluating 57 possible roles of 5 stakeholders is demonstrated here. Findings suggest the lack of collaboration, apprehensive stakeholders, cybersecurity threats, health issues, and cost as crucial barriers to the HEI. The sorting process yields 13 high‐priority roles, encompassing those within the influence of the government (i.e., cybersecurity awareness, allocation of necessary funds, designing more aligned curricula, and streamlining the basic education agenda), university management (i.e., investing in efficient technologies and forging extensive stakeholder collaboration), human resource function (i.e., implementing periodic skills training for educators), and educators (i.e., engaging in continuous learning about cybersecurity threats, integrating awareness of applicable laws against cyberbullying, devising alternative cost‐efficient teaching strategies, taking part in initiatives to improve curricula, efficient preparation of learning materials, and participating in skills development initiatives). Various managerial insights are offered as inputs to the design of initiatives in EDUC4 implementation.

Recent reports associate teachers’ turnover intentions as a response to disruptions and transition of the teaching-learning process (e.g., flexible learning) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explores the antecedents of teachers’ intention to teach in a flexible learning system (FLS) and their turnover intentions via an extended theory of planned behavior (TPB). Using a cross-sectional survey, 417 valid responses were analyzed to model this phenomenon, with self-efficacy and digital nativity as antecedent variables and job satisfaction and organizational commitment as predictors of teachers’ attitudes. We also examined whether the intention to teach in FLS is moderated by age. Results from Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) generate insights from the 12 hypothesized paths of the proposed model. We uncover salient findings such as (1) the extended TPB model explains 61% of the overall variations of intention to teach in FLS, (2) attitude is positively explained by job satisfaction and organizational commitment, (3) digital nativity and self-efficacy positively influence the attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control in the context of teaching in FLS, with perceived behavioral control as the strongest predictor of teaching intention, (4) the negative relationship between intention to teach in FLS and turnover intention of teachers, and (5) age has no moderating effect on the teachers’ intention to teach in FLS. Some practical insights and future research works are outlined in light of these findings.

In view of the recent education sectoral transition to Education 4.0 (EDUC4), evaluating the preparedness of higher education institutions (HEIs) for EDUC4 implementation remains a gap in the current literature. Through a comprehensive review, seven criteria were evaluated, namely, human resources, infrastructure, financial, linkages, educational management, learners, and health and environment. This work offers two crucial contributions: (1) the development of an EDUC4 preparedness indicator system and (2) the design of a computational structure that evaluates each indicator and computes an aggregate preparedness level for an HEI. Using the full consistency method (FUCOM) to assign the priority weights of EDUC4 criteria and the rough set theory to capture the ambiguity and imprecision inherent in the measurement, this study offers an aggregate EDUC4 preparedness index to holistically capture the overall preparedness index of an HEI towards EDUC4. An actual case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed indicator system. After a thorough evaluation, the results indicate that human resources were the most critical criterion, while health and environment ranked last. Insights obtained from the study provide HEIs with salient information necessary for decision making in various aspects, including the design of targeted policies and the allocation of resources conducive to implementing EDUC4 initiatives. The proposed indicator system can be a valuable tool to guide HEIs in pursuing EDUC4, resulting in a more effective and efficient implementation of this educational paradigm.