Conceptualizing Academic Mobility e-Service through the Understanding of Service Relationships

Higher education is facing the challenge of providing a flexible education curriculum that offers academic mobility for students of higher learning. As the popularity of academic program increases, the services rendered for academic mobility is expected to scale up when the demand for academic mobility program increases. To meet this increased demand, the offering of e-services for academic mobility may ease the processing and simultaneously offer potential students information and application support to embark on an academic mobility program. This paper reports on the early effort to conceptualize an academic mobility e-service to gain a good understanding of the underlying service systems requirement. The service system concept by Steven Alter is used in conceptualizing the service relationship. A stakeholder interview with academic mobility service providers and their students who had undergone an academic mobility program was conducted. A thematic analysis on the interview data was conducted and used to illustrate the service relationships and the service triangle between the academic mobility service providers and their customers.