Delivering student satisfaction in higher education: A QFD approach

Evaluation of courses and instructors by students is now common in higher education and, notwithstanding the reservations attending the choice of students as arbiters of teaching quality, many feel that the overall consequence has been a marked improvement in teaching. In this paper we measure quality of teaching by the student satisfaction it generates. Drawing on the well known gap model of customer satisfaction, we model student satisfaction as the gap between student perception and student expectation, and focus on the management of this gap from the perspective of the individual course instructor. The instructor has four critical tasks: understanding student expectation; deploying that understanding into the design of the course; conforming to design specifications in course delivery; and managing student perception. The overall approach is likened to QFD (Quality Function Deployment)-the well known tool of quality management.