PDCA-BASED IMPROVEMENT OF A SERVICE QUALITY FRAMEWORK ON COURSE LEVEL

As the idea of providing the best possible level of service quality in higher education institutions spread, the identification and role of customers have come to the forefront in the related literature. Most studies agree on that students are the primary customers of higher education, highlighting their complex role in the service provision process being 'products', clients and partners at the same time. On the other hand, there are many other stakeholders in higher education including e.g. the government, funding bodies, parents, employers whose expectations and perceptions of service quality should be taken into account as well. This results in the lack of agreement regarding the interpretation of customer in higher education and therefore, being customer focused raises several issues in this sector. One possible approach is investigating service quality on different well-defined levels, namely on institutional, faculty / program and course levels. Regarding the latter one, most studies agree on that students are the primary customers and their perception of quality is of utmost importance, however, the lecturers' point of view is indispensable as well at this level. In this paper the development of a service quality measuring and evaluating framework in case of a special type of course is presented, emphasizing not only the students' but also the supervisors' aspects by conducting several focus group and personal interviews. The proposed questionnaire including 26 statements applied for project work courses is primarily SERVQUAL based similarly to many models proposed in various service industries. In the pilot year, statements were evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale by two aspects, namely, importance and performance. In this year the average response rate was about 70% with more than 500 filled out questionnaires. The results of the focus group and personal interviews are compared to that of the statistical analyses applied for the comparisons of responses given by different segments of students grouped according to various attributes including the level of study, the type of the business program, the level of the project work course. By analysing the interviews, students' and supervisors' feedbacks are confronted by pinpointing both similarities and differences caught in the brainstorming, affinity diagram constructing and Q method sessions by presenting and discussing two stakeholder groups' affinity diagrams and statement rankings. These results may serve as a basis for departmental managerial decisions according to the PDCA philosophy. Taking all the available results into consideration, the questionnaire applied in the pilot year has been revised by exploiting the voice of students and supervisors as well.