Resumen de Student evaluations of training and lecture courses: development of the COURSEQUAL method
Beáta Vajda, Gergely Farkas, Éva Malovics
In a competitive higher education environment service quality is a highly important issue. In this sector, it may have long term effects for both the student and the institution, as it may influence student recommendations as well as their future monetary support. Student experience is one of the factors that university quality assurance systems emphasize as one of the assessment criteria of quality. In our ongoing research, we intend to measure the quality of the process and outcomes of trainings (experience-based courses) offered at an economic and business administration faculty of a Hungarian university, also in comparison with more ‘traditional’ courses. A complex approach is adopted, defining competence development outcomes as the technical quality of the service, while students’ evaluations of the delivery of the courses as the functional quality of the service. For measuring functional quality, we have used a SERVQUAL approach and have developed a new scale, named COURSEQUAL, adopting the original model to a course-level evaluation by students who filled out a post-course questionnaire. In our preliminary analysis, a factor analysis was carried out to validate our scale, resulting in well-interpretable results, showing that our scale for measuring the quality of the service delivery process is valid, though improvable, and shows a good functional quality of our courses.
