Quality function deployment approach to improve technical education: a case study of Technical Training Center (TTC)

Abstract

Education itself is a multimillion dollars industry and is very important to the development of a country. The main purpose of quality assurance in education is to provide confidence to the professionals, students and their parents, employers and their various stakeholders that the requirements for quality education are met continuously. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a method to transform user demands into design quality. QFD helps transform customer needs into engineering characteristics for a product or service. The customer needs is summarized in a product planning matrix called House of Quality. These matrices are used to translate customer needs WHATS into technical characteristics HOWS to satisfy the needs. The quality of education and training being imparted in the technical institutions varies from excellent to poor, with some institutions comparing favorably with the best in the world and many others suffer from different degrees of handicap such as faculty shortages, infrastructure deficiencies, curricula obsolescence, lack of autonomy in academic financial, administrative, and managerial matters; poor involvement in knowledge creation and dissemination, and poor interaction with community and economy. In order to improve the teaching quality of TTC the author considers the principles of total quality management (TQM). The major tool employed is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). In this approach, several steps are followed to expose customer expectations into the service process and ensure that at each level of expectation the highest possible quality is provided. The main goal of this project is to translate the student’s voice into teaching techniques applying QFD approach. For this purpose a questionnaire based survey is performed among the students of TTC to sort out the student requirements. From the collected data, a house of quality is developed and finally the teaching techniques are ranked with respect to the house of quality. The higher the relative weight of the technique, the more the concentration is needed.