Listening to the voice of primary stakeholders : Differences of measuring quality among the operation levels of higher education institutions

Abstract

The growing number of students enrolled in higher education and of the offered courses increasingly emphasizes the need for student-focused activities. Therefore, if sufficient attention is not paid to the evaluation of educational services and to the analyses of the results obtained, the quality of higher education services provided to students as key customers becomes unmanageable. In order to gain competitive advantage in the higher education sector where increasing marketization takes place, institutions have to identify their primary stakeholders as well as their needs and expectations. However, they should not only focus on students, since there are many other stakeholder groups involved in the key processes including e.g. academic staff with whom students have direct interactions and perceive educational service quality primarily through their lecturers' activity. When examining the quality of institutional services, different levels of measurement can be distinguished to each of which primary stakeholders, customers and quality dimensions could be identified. At all three levels (including institutional, program/faculty, course level), the state of the art focuses primarily on the voice of students and lecturers. In this research, the differences and similarities between the three aforementioned levels are demonstrated from the viewpoints of students and lecturers. As a result, three groups of quality attributes are identified on which quality measurement issues should be focused at each level.