A Service Approach to Course Development
Year: 2011
Editor: Kovacevic, Ahmed, Ion, William, McMahon, Chris, Buck, Lyndon and Hogarth, Peter
Author: Watt, Cameron; Ely, Philip; Chapman, Damian
Series: E&PDE
Section: New Design Paradigms
Page(s): 405-410
Abstract
Like many other organizations in both the private and public sectors Higher Education (HE) Institutions are facing challenging and traumatic times as the UK becomes further and mired in the worst recession for 60 years. The resulting political, economic and social pressures have led to an increase in politically driven policy reviews and strategic re-alignment that may well change the nature of Higher Education courses and delivery formats for many years to come. There has been a significant shift to-wards greater customer focus that echoes many other government departments with the imperative to drive employability focused curriculum changes increasing. The results of these debates has understandably led to a large number of valuable recommendations being put forward by the various bodies involved and it is difficult to predict how Universities and Colleges will react. Without doubt the impact of these pressures on the strategic planning and day-to-day operations of HE Institutions cannot fail to be significant as they not only contend with major structural, financial and supply chain constraints but have to do so in an ever increasing competitive marketplace where both students and employers are becoming more demanding and cynical in their choices and perceptions of the value provided by HE education. It is within this context that our work at the University of the Creative Arts (UCA) over the last 6 months has occurred. In this paper we begin to explore how HE education can start to address the issue of delivering value to students by examining how a shift to a paradigm based on lean service design and delivery can add value to course develop processes and outputs. In doing so we introduce the results of phase one of our re-search in the form of a Course Development Model based on Lean and Service design principles. In line with action research principles this Model will be trialed at UCA over the coming 2 years to asses its usability, value and impact on new course quality and student satisfaction
Keywords: Service design, higher education, student experience, course development, program development, innovation