QUALITY IN EDUCATION

This is an attempt to set out a methodology for improving quality in a university department. OPSOMMING: Hierdie bydrae is 'n poging om 'n prosedure vir die verbetering van kwaliteit binne die departement van 'n universiteit uiteen te sit. http://sajie.journals.ac.za

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INTRODUCTI ON
Quality in education is becoming an important issue is a spin-off from the current trend towards eYocellence which has swept the industrial milieu, spilling over into service industries, government and other non-manufacturing sectors.Quality in educa.tion is important enough to have been allocated a track of its own at the 1990 International Conference of the American Society for Quality Control(ASQC>.
Unfortunately, most of the literature available in this topic area is concerned with applications -with HOW we did it.
A general methodology has not been put forward.This paper attempts to fill that gap -and to alert us to the importance of adopting such an approach if we are to continue competing successfully with universities world-wide.
The application of quality management tools and techniques (developed for industrial use> to the academic environment is not difficult.Data are available, and that is all that is needed to construct statistical control charts for monitoring costs, expenditure, resource usage, academic progress, etc.The quality principle is the same, namely to get the process into statistical control, and then having done so, to improve it.But this by itself is not quite enough.Many academic institutions have progressed along the quality route this farCto their credit certainly>, but over and above the use of analytical techniques we also need a comprehensive METHODOLOGY.

METHODOLOGY
A methodology is concerned with WHAT, and not with HOW.It does not stand alone.
It fS centrally placed on the spectrum of science which extends from philosophy at one end to method at the other.

PHILOSPHY (Fuzzy)
-----------METHODOLOGY (Fuzzily Precise) -----!"IETHOD (Precise> It is not possible to discuss methodology without referring to its left hand and right hand flanks on the spectrum.However, in what follows, the area of method per se (such as the use of SPC tools etc.) is glossee!over, and instead space is alloted to the discussion of gUidelines for methodology development and implementation.We will refer to gUidelines as meta-hows, or simply M-Hows.
The development of a methodology is an exercise in systems thinking.We start off by asking WHAT.Every time we ask WHAT we move upwards in the systems hierarchy to a wider-system, and every time we ask HOW we move downwards to a subsystem.Hence asking too many WHATS is a bad thing as it leads to a very wide systems boundary which will contain a number of environmental systems that are irrelevant.So we must know when to stop asking WHAT and to get on with some HOWS.
A fairly logical stopping point, as far as quality in the department of a university is concerned, is the totality of systems inclUded in the boundary drawn around the department, its external customers, and the major suppliers of its resources.This boundary signifies that systems which lie beyond the external customers and the suppliers of resources constitute the environment.These environmental systems include other university departments, politics, socio-economic systems, and cultural systems etc.
One further point which is everyone in the system management, or whatever, Supplier, and Manager.For example a lecturer may at one point in time be seen as a customer by his students who would then be wearing the hat of supplier.But at another point in time the students are customers and the lecturer is the supplier.The hat of manager is ever present because we are all continually managing our affairs and our resources.
Given this situation, are we all aware of the needs of our customers, and how to supply them with a superior product or service?
Have we(as customers) informed our suppliers of our particular requirements, and how these should be met?If we have not done these things EXPLICITLY then no time should be lost in doing so for they are the very essence of quality improvement.
But to return to the development of a methodology, starting at the external customer/supplier interface and working top-down, the systems hierarchy unfolds as follows: Know the voice of the external customers (SA Industry, Professional Societies etc.) Know also the voice of the internal customers (other departments, staff, students) Quality Function Deployment (QFD).QFD again, modified to suit.QFD also ~nsures that actions taken are based on these original customer requirements.
The QFD discipline provides us with a framework and a structured process to enhance an organization's ability to communicate, document, analyse, and prioritize its efforts.When correctly applied, QFD enables an organization to exceed the expectations of the customer.It works best within an organization when there is strong commitment and a disciplined approach to implementation.
To explain the meaning of the phrase OFD Kogure & Akao (Quality Progress June 1988 p 5) wrote: "In Japanese, deployment refers to an extension and broadening of activities.
Thus QFD means that respDnsibilities for producing a quality it~must be assigned to all parts of the corporation."The idea that drives QFD is the Voice of the Customer.
The idea is to find out what the customer wants and then to use this information for product development, rather than first developing a product or service and then finding out what the customer does not like about it.
In the case of a university, QFD has a apart from the voices of the external must also heed the voice of Society Civilization in particular.Western Civilization, according to George Reisman[lJ, is a body of knowledge and values.
Its ideas entail an understanding and acceptance of the laws of logic; the concept of causality and consequently, of a universe ruled by natural laws intelligible to man; the whole known corpus of the laws of mathematics and science; the individual's self-responsibility based on his free will to chose between good and evil; the value of man above all other species on the basis of his unique possesion of the power of reason.Thus, QFD (in academia) is not simply a free market exercise, but is subject to constraints imposed by the meta environmental systems which lie beyond the boundary discussed above, and which are the cornerstone of Western Civilization.
All major suppliers of goods and equipment should be audited as to their QUALITY of PRODUCT and QUALITY of SERVICE.Generally the audit in these two dimensions of quality will classify suppliers from Al (the best) through to D4 say -i.e.16 possibilities in all.This is the system favoured by the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce who require that the audit be conducted by an independent consultant at the suppliers' expense.As well as this matrix another must be developed for the goods themselves and the variables used here are COST and CRITICALITY.be conduc ted Hence a critical.high cost items of stationery would be This classification could Depar tmen t.To use the system, suppliers with ratings of B2 or better are chosen fOl' the supply of critical high cost items irrespective of whether Dr not they are the lowest tenderers.On the other hand the supply ofC~class and.D~lass items would fall to cheaper vendors with ~atings in the lower right hand portion of the supplier-matrix.

is to achieve
Regarding students {which from a certain viewpoint may be regarded as raw material}, the qualifications required by the University for their admission is a form of quality control at the source, but unlike the parallel activity in industry, it does not primarily determine the quaJity of the final ouput.
RELLV[2J points this out clear 1)' and goes on to state that adlllission criteria in fact determine how hard we have to work to produce good output.
He says: ~Obviously our universities cannot take in all comers, but equally I don't think that they can simply write their own cheque on society, demanding a school system which provides them with entrants optimally trained to their specifications, so as to make the task of tertiary education as simple as possible."Thus part of the quality challenge facing universities enable poor students(who are prepared to make the effort) AN UNLOWERED qualification by the time they finish.

Mission Statement
This is NOT a wish list.
It is a formal declaration of intent, a list of objectives which are being achieved at this moment in time by dedicated human activity subsystems within the organization.The mission statement is therefore a systems lIIap of the organization.As such it is evolutionary, dynamic, and creative.

Quality Guidelines
A number of quality guidelines proposed by leading experts in the field are to be found in the TOe literature.To see how these guidelines can be tailored to suit a particular organization, in this case a university department, Deming's 14 points have been restructured and condensed below.The reader may wish to compare this list with the original which has been published extensively elsewhere, inter alia, Nancy Mann[3J.
Deming's Points [Restructured for Academia): 1) Create constancy of purpose in the institution.2) Insist on statisticaL.evidence of the quality of all the institution's operations and processes.
3} Insist on statistical evidence of the academic ability of staff and of the ability and pr,ogress of students.4} Examine the problems in the system, structure them, solve them, and in so doing contribute to a program of continuous improvemen t. 5) Eliminate numerical(pedestrian} goals for members of staff.Eliminate standards that prescribe numerical quotas(or equivalent} and replace them ~ith imaginative, creative, handson, statistically based incentives.6} Replace fixed-period inspection(examination) by RANDOM evaluation of student"s ability and progress.7} Institute modern methods of tuition.8} Improve methods of supervision of faculty and staff.9} Break down barriers be~een departments in the university.10) Remove barriers that stand between the department and its students and which inhibit their(the students} pride of achievement.

11) Institute a vigorous program of education and development of
Staff.
It must be stressed that there are many sets of guidelines for Total Quality Management.Amongst these are the guidelines proposed by Phil Crosby, Armand Feigenbaum, and Genichi Taguchi -all of which can be restructured for academia.

Monitor and Keep Pace
One of the major problems that occurs in organizations is that the dynamic nature of the systems hierarchy within which they exist is not explicitly recognized.
Stafford Beer[4J pointed out (very clearly) in an invited lecture to the British Institute of Management the fact that our models of institutions and enterprises are Wildly out of date.He said that our organizational structures are frozen out of history.
"If you look at any of our big institutions, our oldest established firms, our government departments, then you will find them all structured according to something that happened in the past." "Having this frozen structure we are naturally using the methods appropriate to that structure.
But if the structure is no longer appropriate in the real world then neither are the methods.""The situation has moved on, and so have we; the situation has repeatedly changed, and so have we.
But we have enshrined the model.Therefore the lines connecting everything to the old model become more and more stretched.""My message is this.The elastic has broken." There is a very real message for our universities in these words.By taking a long hard quality orientated view of our institutions we will be in a position to ADAPT to the big shifts which are taking place in the environment.a supplement ins ti tu tions, patterned on for and the The improvement of American schooling is also receiving a great deal of attention because: