Improving the Quality of Technical Education Through International Standardization: The Case of Coast Institute of Technology, Kenya

Abstract

The quest for quality technical education is today inextricably bound up with the processes and impact of globalization. Therefore, technical institutions need to improve the quality of instruction if they are to be significant players in the world’s economic arena. Although the debate on the attributes of quality education is still in progress, quality teaching and learning can best be described by performance outcomes in the classroom environment and a persisting change in performance that results from experience and interaction with the world. Nevertheless, the ISO 9001:2008 concept of quality, where quality is evaluated in terms of customer satisfaction, has been adopted by many learning institutions with a general feeling that ISO 9001:2008 is more applicable to institutions offering service-oriented training, as opposed to subject-oriented teaching. This chapter argues that when ISO 9001:2008 standards documented on curriculum implementation policy manual are followed by teachers, they may cause a positive change to student academic performance. It examines the efforts that have been undertaken to improve the quality of teaching and learning in technical education and focuses on the Coast Institute of Technology (CIT) as one of the educational institutions that have embraced and included ISO 9001 implementation in their programs of instruction and thus provides empirical evidence of the causal relationship between ISO standardization and improved academic performance through the following research questions: What is the level of awareness of students and teachers at CIT on ISO 9001:2008 standards? To what extent are ISO 9001:2008 standards on curriculum implementation procedures followed by CIT teachers? In what ways have ISO 9001:2008 standards influenced students’ academic performance in Coast Institute of Technology?