Abstract:

Maintaining high levels of quality and customer satisfaction is a significant challenge for many organizations, including universities, today. This paper proposes the application of ISO 10001 and ISO 10002, the respective international standards focused on Customer satisfaction codes of conduct and Customer complaint handling (ISO 1001; ISO 1002) with the objective to establish, apply and monitor these codes for student satisfaction and quality assurance at a course level as well as to "setup and use a simple system for handling unsolicited student feedback and improving course delivery based upon it in order to increase students active participation and satisfaction with the course" (Karapetrovic and Doucette, 2009).

Customer satisfaction standards from the ISO 10000 series can be easily applied in teaching, as they can be targeted on different “customers”, for example, students, course instructors, teaching assistants, support staff, accreditation bodies, professional associations and industry. Moreover, they are usable at various levels of educational delivery, from individual lectures and labs, through courses to programs and beyond (Karapetrovic and Doucette, 2009). For instance, ISO 1001 can be used to establish codes of conduct by professors aiming to guarantee aspects of their teaching, such as the delivery of prompt responses to student questions, on-time delivery of grades, compliance of course components with the established criteria or sufficient skills of course graduates to the industry (Karapetrovic and Doucette, 2009). In the same line, ISO 10002 can be used to implement a system for handling feedback from the students and analyzing such feedback to improve teaching.

The standards are applied as a pilot study in one course taught by the author, specifically a general management undergraduate course with 123 students offered in the management faculty of a Catalan university. First, we illustrate the implementation of the systems and we subsequently discuss the establishment, application and monitoring of the two standards for student satisfaction, with a description of some of the results from the application of each of these ISO 10001 and ISO 1002 based processes, namely the indications received from the related end-of-course student surveys.

References
ISO 10001 (2007), Quality Management – Customer Satisfaction – Guidelines for Codes of Conduct for Organizations, International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
ISO 10002 (2004), Quality Management – Customer Satisfaction – Guidelines for Complaints Handling in Organizations, International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
Karapetrovic, S., and Doucette, J. (2009), “An Application of Customer Satisfaction Standards in Engineering Management Courses”, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin.

Keywords:

Student satisfaction, Quality assurance in education, Undergraduate courses, ISO 1001, ISO 1002.