Resumen de Listening to students as a way of improving teaching: application of QFD-based Techniques to a final year subject
Andrés Díaz Lantada, Pilar Lafont Morgado, Javier Echavarri Otero, Juan Manuel Muñoz-Guijosa, José Luis Muñoz Sanz
The use of techniques based on ‘QFD-Quality Function Deployment’ approaches has some major, outstanding teaching applications thatare closely linked to the work of individualising teaching, improving student–teacher relations, and optimising the services offered byeducational institutions, by actively listening to what students want. In particular, in the current context of the implementation of theEuropean Higher Education Area, through which it is intended to focus the teaching–learning process on students and their individualwork, it is very important to consider students’ opinions and their ideas concerning their future professional development. This work setsout the application of QFD techniques for assessing teaching quality, perceived through student satisfaction in the course called ‘Designand Manufacturing of Plastic Products’ taught on the 5th course of the Machine and Manufacturing specialisations as part of theIndustrial Engineering degree of Madrid Polytechnic University. The power of the method used has enabled 60 students’ needs to beanalysed as well as their relationship with 30 teaching tools, services and processes that are available in any university and that can beused to find out which issues need strengthening according to the 1800 relationships integrated into the model. It has also beencompared to a Blitz QFD1based approach that lets this type of quality analysis be performed and proposals for improvement be mademore directly. After these systematic QFD and Blitz QFD1analyses several improvements have been introduced within the subject, soas to tackle the main student needs that were detected. Such actions have promoted the knowledge acquired by students and the qualityof teaching, as can be seen from the comparison made between final results from the 2008–2009 course and those from the 2009–2010course.
