Continuous Quality Measurement in Higher Education

Abstract

Colleges and universities are facing three common challenges in the face of increasing demands for accountability: Continuous Quality Improvement, Student Retention, and Accreditation. Dey Systems, Inc. (DSI) develops continuous quality measurement tools, called Quality Measurement Systems (QMS) that are used for continuous quality improvement. A DSI on-line QMS incorporates a completely automated process for unbiased data collection and analysis. It links data to other information within its domain, and with information from other domains. DSI serves a broad array of clients from various industries with QMS applications. In this paper the authors discuss the implementation of a multi-level QMS for the University of Louisville, a major metropolitan university with 22,000 students, located in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

The university based QMS will continuously measure quality and satisfaction of various constituents, at various levels, across the entire institution along with establishing a relational data warehouse populated with various data elements representing various constituents. The QMS model is being considered for other higher education institutions at this stage. The paper is geared towards examining the needs, benefits, implications and establishment of an on-line real time quality measurement process and tool with data from and representing various constituents in a large higher education institution. The paper also discuses foundations for a true n-tired client-server decision support system that can be made available at the administrator, faculty and staff level to eventually understand the integrated dynamics of educational outcome.