Abstract:

Quality is an important indicator of competitiveness at Education and it is one of the main issues examined by modern scholars and practitioners at the international education market (Grifoll et al. 2010). Student’s satisfaction provides a view on how the customer experiences the service and it is considered a key indicator in the teaching-learning process (Zas, 2002). The main objective of this research consists in building a metric to measure quality in education from the perception of student’s satisfaction at two Universities, Arcada UAS, Finland, vs ESPAM MFL, Ecuador.

Later on, the proposed metric has been applied to identify the existence of differences amongst both Universities according to the level of quality. The interactions between both criteria are also shown.

A stratified random sample composed by 559 students in the period 2016-2018 was collected by a survey composed of 14 items: 8 social and 6 quantitative variables related to perceived quality by students in organizational aspects. The survey’s reliability was verified by using Cronbach’s alpha (alfa>0,7). Arcada UAS presents a value over 0.85, ESPAM MFL presents a value over 0.93 and the value was over 0.91 when data were accumulated by both universities.

By considering the 8 variables collected in the first part of the survey; each University was described and the homogeneity between both Universities was evaluated according to the variables: age, sex and perception of the increase or decrease of quality in the different attributes. A contrast of the heterogeneity of samples was made independently of CHI2. The absence of heterogeneity amongst Universities favours the accumulated processing of data (p >0,01), according to Mohedano et al. (2013), that compares students in Spanish and German Universities, and Lee (2007) that aggregates samples of Universities coming from three different countries (USA, South Korea and Ucrania).

Quality has been measured by the level of student’s perceived satisfaction dealing with the following aspects at both Universities: Lectures/Instructors, Students’ representatives, Administrative officers, Materials, Communication channels and Training contents with a likert scale from 1 (non-satisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). In this case the intervals between the scale points correspond to empirical observations in a metric sense. According to Reips and Funke (2008) a visual analogue scale was used. Two levels of quality were established by considering the statistic descriptor of the accumulated variable: Non-quality for values accumulated under 19 points and quality for values over 19 points. This indicator was built according to Uriel et al. (2013) and De-Pablos-Heredero et al. (2017).

Later on, the proposal of a quality indicator by means of a generalized lineal model (GLM) was verified by two factors exhibiting interactions; where quality (Non-quality vs Quality) and University (ARCADA vs ESPAM) were considered main factors. SPSS statistics software (version 22.0) was used for all the processing of data.

The use of this methodology favors the building of a quantitative indicator of student’s perceived quality in organizational aspects, and the comparison of two universities that present different socioeconomic and organizational realities allows contrasting the indicator’s reliability.

Keywords:

Relational coordination, quality, satisfaction, upper education, shared objectives, mutual respect communication.