As big data becomes an apparent challenge to handle when building a business intelligence (BI) system, there is a motivation to handle this challenging issue in higher education institutions (HEIs). Monitoring quality in HEIs encompasses handling huge amounts of data coming from different sources. This paper reviews big data and analyses the cases from the literature regarding quality assurance (QA) in HEIs. It also outlines a framework that can address the big data challenge in HEIs to handle QA monitoring using BI dashboards and a prototype dashboard is presented in this paper. The dashboard was developed using a utilisation tool to monitor QA in HEIs to provide visual representations of big data. The prototype dashboard enables stakeholders to monitor compliance with QA standards while addressing the big data challenge associated with the substantial volume of data managed by HEIs’ QA systems. This paper also outlines how the developed system integrates big data from social media into the monitoring dashboard