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Journal of Education for Business
ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20
Curriculum and Course Design: A New Approach
Using Quality Function Deployment
James W. Denton , Virginia Franke & Kleist Nanda Surendra
To cite this article: James W. Denton , Virginia Franke & Kleist Nanda Surendra (2005)
Curriculum and Course Design: A New Approach Using Quality Function Deployment, Journal of Education for Business, 81:2, 111-117, DOI: 10.3200/JOEB.81.2.111-118
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JOEB.81.2.111-118
Published online: 07 Aug 2010.
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ABSTRACT. In this article, the authors
describe a method for assuring the quality
of curriculum design based on techniques
that have been used in industrial settings for
over 30 years. Quality Function
Deploy-ment assures that the needs of the customer
are considered at all levels of product
design and a graphical matrix called the
House of Quality serves as an aid in
achiev-ing its objectives. We provide an example
showing how to apply these principles and
techniques to business curriculum and
course design in the academic domain of
Management Information Systems. The
resulting curricula will be more likely to
address the needs of the employers of
busi-ness school graduates and the resulting
doc-umentation will be valuable in guiding
sub-sequent curriculum redesigns as the needs
of business evolve.
Copyright © 2005 Heldref Publications
t is a nearly universal problem in academia that resources are limited, and this constraint is nowhere more apparent than in curriculum and course design. Often, there are too few faculty members to achieve depth in all areas of a major field or not enough courses avail-able in a sequence to enavail-able the students to achieve full exposure to all of the important topics in an educational pro-gram. Further, at times there may be a lack of coordination across or within courses to ensure that either the duplica-tion or overlap of topics is eliminated.
The challenges of maintaining an up-to-date curriculum are even greater in an area such as Management Informa-tion Systems (MIS), which is constant-ly changing as technology advances. MIS education is a dynamic discipline, and, therefore, is in constant need for reassessment (Gill & Hu, 1999; Lee, Trauth, & Farwell, 1995). Failure to reassess MIS education risks the inabil-ity to keep up with the needs of the cor-porate employers of the students in those academic MIS programs. Sound curriculum design must balance the needs of all of the program’s stakehold-ers (Lightfoot, 1999) and incorporate the viewpoints of MIS practitioners (Ehie, 2002). As a consequence of these factors, the construction of edu-cational programs and courses within the MIS curriculum would benefit from using a formal design methodology to
assure the efficient deployment of scarce inputs to the educational pro-duction process.
In this article, we propose that the technique of Quality Function Deploy-ment (QFD), aided by a graphical aid, the House of Quality (HoQ), may be useful in curriculum and course design. QFD and the HoQ are taken from the reference discipline of Quality Assur-ance and are normally applied in an industrial setting. Here, we describe the QFD process and its applicability in course programming and then apply the process in a sample curriculum applica-tion, as well as within a sample course. We suggest that the use of these quality assurance techniques can yield benefits to educational leadership in overcoming resource constraints while delivering rich and deep courses within a well-designed curriculum.
QFD is used in industry to assure that the design and manufacture of new prod-ucts considers all of the needs and desires of the customer (Cohen, 1995; Day, 1993). It originated in Japan’s shipbuild-ing industry in the early 1970s (Kogure & Akao, 1983) and was introduced to Western managers by Hauser and Claus-ing (1988). In addition to manufacturClaus-ing, the QFD approach has been applied to such varied activities as strategic plan-ning (Maddux, Amos, & Wyskida, 1991), project management (Hill & Warfield, 1972), and group decision support
sys-Curriculum and Course Design:
A New Approach Using Quality
Function Deployment
JAMES W. DENTON VIRGINIA FRANKE KLEIST NANDA SURENDRA
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
I
tems (Wolfe, 1994). QFD is a tool to aid communications between an organiza-tion’s marketing function, which is aware of the needs and desires of the customer, and the engineering function, which must produce a technical product specification that satisfies those needs and desires. In industry, it is common to develop com-plex products by designing multiple components of those products concur-rently instead of sequentially, saving time in bringing a new product to market. The parallel nature of the design makes com-munication critical, so that all of the designed components fit together result-ing in a product that is neither deficient in satisfying customer requirements, nor overengineered with unnecessarily dupli-cated features.
The industrial process of designing a product to satisfy certain customer requirements is similar to the academic process of designing a curriculum to satisfy the needs of its constituents. For example, in the university setting, we have administrators who set curricular objectives, professors who design acad-emic programs and individual courses according to their own views, and stu-dents who become the products of the educational programmatic design. Courses within a new academic pro-gram are often developed concurrently and then assembled, possibly with exist-ing courses, into a curriculum. It is crit-ical that such courses cover all of the necessary topics so that students in the academic program do not miss critical information while avoiding unnecessary duplication.
Practitioners in industry often use a simple graphical tool, the House of Qual-ity, as an aid in achieving the objectives of the QFD approach to design. The HoQ technique presents a conceptual map to assist in identifying key relationships in the design, provide documentation for the design process, and assure that the needs of the customer are not forgotten. In industry, applying the HoQ offers a convenient method for translating cus-tomer requirements into product specifi-cations. It can provide a similar function in an academic environment by providing a map for translating the expected capa-bilities of graduating students into course and curriculum content. The following sections describe the formal HoQ process
in an industrial setting followed by an example from an academic setting.
Structure of the HoQ
In their article, Hauser and Clausing (1988) used the design of a car door to provide an example of how the HoQ approach is applied in an industrial set-ting. Figure 1 shows part of the resulting HoQ matrix for the car door example and illustrates how the HoQ approach is used to assure that all of the quality requirements of the customer are addressed in the product’s design. The HoQ includes six major areas that fit together to form the shape of a house.
Customer requirements are listed in Area 1. For example, in designing typi-cal customer requirements for a car door in terms that the customer understands might include: “easy to close,” “easy to open,” and “stays open on a hill.” These customer requirements are typically gathered through market research and focus groups and serve as functional specifications for the component.
Area 2 of the HoQ lists engineering characteristics in technical terms. In the car door example, this area would include specification of the effort required to open and close the door, expressed as measures of force and energy that engineers understand, but would be meaningless to a typical cus-tomer. A next to a characteristic indi-cates that more of that characteristic is desirable and a indicates that less of the characteristic is desirable.
The relationship matrix in Area 3 shows correlations between the cus-tomer requirements and the engineering characteristics. Double plus and minus signs indicate strong positive and strong negative correlations, respectively, and single plus and minus signs indicate weaker correlations. The relationship matrix is useful in industry for coordi-nating potential design changes in response to a customer requirement, so that other customer requirements are not compromised. For example, engineers involved in the design of a car door may increase the door seal resistance in an effort to reduce the likelihood of a leak in rainy weather. That change, however, will negatively impact the ability to eas-ily close the door. Engineers, therefore, must evaluate this trade-off as they
con-sider potential design changes. The pur-pose of the HoQ is not to decide this design issue, but rather to make sure that the issue is raised in the design phase, before costly production changes or product recalls become necessary.
Area 4 of the industrial HoQ is typi-cally used to identify trade-offs between pairs of engineering characteristics. For example, increasing the door’s peak clos-ing force will improve the door seal resis-tance, but this may cause a decrease in customer satisfaction because the door will not be as easy to close from the out-side, as indicated in the relationship matrix. This provides a warning to engi-neers that such changes should be made with care. Synergies may also be identi-fied in this area. For example, acoustic transmission will positively affect road noise reduction. The trade-off matrix in Area 4 allows the entire design team, both engineers and marketers, to recog-nize the downstream ramifications of making changes to a product’s design.
Area 5 of the HoQ is used for compet-itive assessment, where two or three competing products typically are selected for comparison with the proposed prod-uct design. A comparison between the proposed product and each competing product is made for every customer requirement in Area 1. This step reveals the strengths and the weaknesses of the new design and, through the relationship matrix, points to engineering characteris-tics that may require adjustment to better compete in the marketplace.
Area 6, the basement of the HoQ, is used for technical assessment and setting target values for the engineering charac-teristics. The technical assessment of our car door versus our competitors’ products lists the actual measurement of the engi-neering characteristics for each product and specifies target values for our redesign effort.
Using Quality Function Deployment in Curriculum Design
The following describes how the HoQ approach can be applied to the design of an academic program. As an example, a hypothetical MIS curricu-lum will be used. Figure 2 shows a sam-pling of the entries that might be placed in each of the six areas of the HoQ.
Area 1 lists the expected abilities of the program’s graduates. These repre-sent desirable outcomes for the cus-tomer that result from using the product. In this context, the product is a graduate of the MIS program, and the customer is their future employer, the downstream consumer of the academic product. The IS 2002 model curriculum guidelines for an undergraduate degree in informa-tion systems (Gorgone et. al., 2002) was used to identify the desired capabilities
of MIS graduates. Because of space limitations, our figure shows only a sub-set of the 72 capabilities in 14 areas list-ed in the curriculum guidelines.
Of course, the specific expected abil-ities of the graduates will vary depend-ing on the academic discipline. In areas such as creative arts or a liberal arts program, the output abilities may be conceptual, hard to establish, and com-plex to measure. In an engineering cur-riculum, the output abilities will be
more traditional, clear-cut, and have less variance across universities. In the MIS discipline, expected graduate abilities fall into several categories: (a) commu-nication, (b) information technology, (c) professional behavior, (d) interpersonal relationships, (e) management, (f) prob-lem solving, (g) systems analysis and development, (h) systems theory, and (i) computer applications. Within each of these general areas are more specific abilities and skills. For example, the
communication area would include the ability to write memos, reports, and documentation; the ability to organize and make a presentation; the ability to express complex ideas in simple terms; and the ability to obtain information through surveys and interviews. System analysis skills include the ability to select and use appropriate methods; the ability to use analysis and design tools; the ability to assess feasibility and risk; and the ability to apply design methods.
These graduate abilities are analogous to the customer requirements in the industrial HoQ. This listing assures that customer needs, or the needs of poten-tial employers, will be considered in the curriculum design.
Area 2 contains elements of the com-mon body-of-knowledge of the specific academic discipline represented. For an MIS curriculum, the body-of-knowledge consists of: (a) computer architecture, (b) data structures, (c) programming
lan-guages, (d) databases, (e) decision theory, (f) organizational behavior, (g) systems development, and (h) project manage-ment. For a creative arts graduate, the common body-of-knowledge might con-tain (a) design essentials, (b) perfor-mance criteria, and (c) portfolio outputs. Body-of-knowledge elements, therefore, are analogous to the engineering charac-teristics shown in Area 2 of the industrial HoQ. Whereas engineering characteris-tics are expressed in the language of the
engineer, body-of-knowledge elements are expressed in the language of the aca-demic practitioner. One difference is that engineering characteristics are measur-able (road noise levels, forces required to open and close doors, etc.), but body-of-knowledge elements are not so easily quantified.
Area 3 of the HoQ, the relationship matrix, links the vocationally motivated expected capabilities of graduates in Area 1 to the common body-of-knowl-edge components of an academic spe-cialization in Area 2. The relationship matrix performs the critical function of exploring the intersection between the specific outputs required by potential employers and the overarching themes that the students are expected to com-mand. Any gaps, weaknesses, or redun-dancies in coverage will be shown on the relationship matrix. Program designers must assure that each expect-ed graduate ability is addressexpect-ed ade-quately in the body-of-knowledge cov-ered by the program.
For example, if an expected graduate ability is not related to any knowledge element, additional body-of-knowledge elements should be added to the curriculum. It also may be possible to identify extraneous body-of-knowl-edge elements so that they may be removed from the curriculum. In addi-tion, the HoQ functions as a road map for potential future changes in the cur-riculum. When changes in a program’s body-of-knowledge are considered, the HoQ will show the impact of those changes on the abilities of the program’s graduates. Alternatively, as the require-ments of graduates change, the HoQ will indicate how the body-of-knowl-edge elements should be adjusted. Thus, the relationship matrix can function as a formal mechanism to evaluate the trade-off between expectations of the faculty and the expectations of the employer with respect to a student’s ownership of knowledge.
In the academic version of the HoQ, Area 4 does not provide identifiable paired trade-offs as are apparent in the industrial HoQ. Increasing a component in one area of the body-of-knowledge will not adversely affect another specif-ic area, but there is a general trade-off among all areas: An increase in
empha-sis on one area will necessarily decrease the emphasis on other areas because there is a finite amount of time available in the curriculum. Instead of identifying trade-offs, we suggest that Area 4 should be used to identify and capture critical prerequisite areas to ensure proper learning flow and understanding on the part of the students. In this way, the HoQ can indicate that the study of systems analysis should precede the study of systems design.
In a similar vein, the competitive assessment in Area 5 of the industrial HoQ cannot be transferred directly into its academic counterpart. It is not prac-tical or even appropriate to identify spe-cific “competitors” as a curriculum is being designed, but a relative assess-ment can nonetheless be accomplished eventually through feedback received from program graduates and their employers. The assessment may reveal weaknesses that can be addressed through adjusting the curriculum design in response to specific deficiencies in the abilities of the graduates.
In the industrial HoQ, Area 6 provides a technical assessment of the engineering characteristics of Area 2 compared with those of existing competitors. It also indi-cates target values for design improve-ment efforts. The same area can be used in the academic HoQ to show the relative amount of time spent in each of the body-of-knowledge areas identified in Area 2 and to indicate potential increases or decreases in emphasis for certain body-of-knowledge areas. These numbers can be entered as classroom hours, or per-centages of the total curriculum. Thus, curriculum designers will be constrained not to exceed the total number of room hours available. When the class-room hours covering one body-of-knowl-edge area are increased, it also will be necessary to identify an equivalent num-ber of hours representing a decrease in other areas.
Extending the HoQ
In industry, it is common to continue the design process by increasing the level of detail and constructing an addi-tional HoQ for each of the subcompo-nent parts that make up a composubcompo-nent. When moving to a higher level of detail,
the engineering characteristics in Area 2 are listed in Area 1 of the new HoQ, becoming requirements to be addressed in the design of each subcomponent. The academic HoQ can be similarly broken down into more detailed matrices that address the design of the individual courses that make up the curriculum.
Figure 3 shows how the HoQ for an MIS curriculum design might be extended to the course level. The HoQ for one course, Systems Analysis, is shown. Area 1 lists a subset of the body-of-knowledge elements identified for the curriculum that are appropriate for the systems analysis course, taken from Area 2 of the curriculum-level HoQ. A course designer can add activities in Area 2 that are necessary to achieve the objectives of the body-of-knowledge elements (e.g., guest speakers, projects, videos, textbook exercises, case studies, and readings). The relationship matrix in Area 3 indicates which classroom activities will address each of the required body-of-knowledge elements. Area 4 can be used to indicate sequence requirements of the activities, Area 5 can be used to assess the degree to which the objectives of the body-of-knowledge elements were attained, and Area 6 can be used to target improve-ments and redesign opportunities for future course offerings.
In the curriculum-level HoQ, Area 1 contains the whats of the curriculum design, (i.e., what the customer wants). Area 2 contains the hows (i.e., how the curriculum design will deliver what the customer wants). At the next HoQ level, the hows of the curriculum design become the whats of the course design. Thus, each element identified as critical for achieving customer satisfaction must be addressed in the design of the courses that make up the curriculum.
Conclusions
We have shown how an established tool from the field of quality assurance can be applied to the academic activities of curriculum and course design. The technique of quality function deploy-ment and the associated HoQ graphic can be used to assure that a program’s graduates have skills and abilities that will be valuable to their future
ers. After the initial development of the curriculum, the HoQ can be used as a guide for revising and updating the cur-riculum. QFD can be a valuable tool in developing curricula in an environment of limited resources.
An MIS curriculum is a particularly good candidate for applying QFD and HoQ principles. MIS is a rapidly chang-ing field, and it is a challenge for acad-emics to keep up with the constant evo-lution of information technologies and their uses. Business practitioners and academic researchers agree that the
skills and abilities of MIS graduates must undergo constant revision to guar-antee that those graduates will be capa-ble of providing valuacapa-ble service to their employers. The documentation provided by the HoQ will be invaluable in guiding those revisions. Thus, the “voice of the customer,” in the form of the employers of MIS graduates, will be heard in the design of the courses to be taken by its graduates.
The HoQ serves as a formal road map to translate graduate requirements in the language of employers into curriculum
elements in the language of the acade-mics. Ideally, this process will result in a give-and-take exchange of views on how to best design a curriculum that serves the needs of future employers. The QFD process forces curriculum designers to adopt a “customer orientation” and for-mally address the needs of the job mar-ket in determining the body-of-knowl-edge elements that make up the curriculum. Further, those body-of-knowledge elements will become course requirements that must be addressed when individual courses are designed.
Adherence to the QFD procedure will reduce the likelihood of knowledge gaps in graduating students while at the same time minimize unnecessary duplication in topic coverage.
NOTE
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. James W. Denton, Associate Professor, College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University, PO Box 6025, Morgan-town, West Virginia 26506-6025. E-mail: jim.den-ton@mail.wvu.edu
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