Bridging the gap: an alternative tool for course evaluation

Abstract

The increasing perception of students as customers of services puts a stronger focus on improving the quality of the student experience. Satisfaction with aspects of service, such as access, flexibility and fitness for purpose can be assessed through student feedback questionnaires. The results of these surveys may not immediately suggest strategies for making improvement. How to bridge any gaps between what students look for and what they experience requires knowledge of student expectations and experiences separately. This paper describes an alternative evaluation tool, QUEST, based on a service template approach and explains how it has been used for evaluating the level of student satisfaction with HE distance education courses. QUEST is web‐based and produces a measure of satisfaction for a range of service quality aspect of the course provision. The results can be interrogated at several layers of detail to produce a clear picture of where issues arise and to identify how they might be addressed. The paper describes how these outputs from an evaluation might be interpreted to suggest strategies for improving the fit between what students look for from a particular course of study and what they experience.

Keywords:

• Distance education
• Service template
• Student satisfaction