Exploring Influential Factors of Industry–University Collaboration Courses in Logistics Management: An Interval-Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy WASPAS Approach

The development of E-commerce and digitalization drives the rapid change in logistics management practices and poses challenges to traditional talent training modes in logistics field. Nowadays, companies expect university graduates equipped with more practical logistics skills to connect tighter with the industry. This motivates universities to establish more practically relevant curriculums to enhance students’ career competitiveness. Under such background, industry–university collaboration courses are increasingly adopted in higher education institutes in logistics discipline. Due to the difference between this type of course and the traditionally taught courses, the learning outcome of it can be difficult to guarantee. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the influential factors of the learning outcomes of industry–university collaboration courses and establish the actionable strategies to enhance course quality. However, the current literature in logistics management education has little focus on this topic, resulting in gaps on clarifying the influential factors of learning outcomes of industry–university collaboration courses in this discipline. Applying a mixed method, this study conducted a case study for an industry–university collaboration course of a logistics discipline in a Chinese university. The interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy (IVPF) numbers and the Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) methods were used. The results showed that there are 15 factors which can influence the outcomes of industry–university collaboration courses in logistics discipline. Among them, the most important factor is the working environment, followed by the students’ own ability. Also, the results indicated that students’ optimistic attitudes towards the course, whether students take the course seriously, and course evaluations can be influential factors for good learning outcomes. The sensitivity analysis was then conducted, showing that the results were robust. This study can contribute to the existing literature by providing a theoretical framework to understand and assess the quality of industry–university collaboration courses in logistics and relevant subjects, as well as offering new analytical tools for management educational studies. Moreover, this study can provide practical implications for educators to develop and maintain good industry–university collaboration courses and trainings. Specifically, a practical life-cycle view was suggested to put pertinent efforts in all periods before/during/after the course to achieve high course outcomes.