Value co‐creation and university teaching quality

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate value co‐creation in assessing higher education (HE) teaching quality by acknowledging the influence of all interacting parties: teachers, students and general university service. The paper questions the appropriateness of student satisfaction surveys for assessing lecturer performance.Design/methodology/approachBy introducing co‐creation and interaction between several stakeholders the paper deals with a complex problem which is best addressed through multiple approaches. The paper uses a literature review of HE quality together with empirical case study research of one university based on data from documents, student surveys and interviews with lecturers. The data are interpreted in the light of the recent theory of service (S‐D) logic and many‐to‐many marketing.FindingsThe paper highlights the complexity of HE service and recommends that EHEA assumes a co‐creation perspective. Resources are provided by lecturers, students and university service which require an interactive approach through which the parties integrate these resources. The information asymmetry between lecturers and students invalidates student satisfaction surveys as an instrument to assess teaching quality. The complexity of HE teaching cannot be boiled down to a single number that forms the ground for comparison between lecturers.Originality/valueThe paper offers a more valid perspective on HE quality by applying the concepts of value co‐creation and resource integration. It shows that the current one‐sided student evaluation of teachers is inadequate.

Improving Society by Improving Education through Service-Dominant Logic: Reframing the Role of Students in Higher Education

“…More recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing HE services from the SDL perspective. Thus, some researchers have used this approach to analyze different HE service aspects, such as the importance of pedagogy over technology in HE provision [45], the change in the focus of the marketization debate to a co-creation approach [2], the assessment of lecturer's performance only by the use of student satisfaction surveys [31], the identification of types of value expected by students from universities [32], and the degrees of co-creation experiences lived by international students in university-student-community engagement [46].…”

“…Some advocate that this metaphor may be useful to achieve a customer focus in HE in the context of the marketized university [11,20,43,[58][59][60]. However, others argue that considering students as customers is unhelpful [51], unproductive [12], delusional [19], controversial and emotional [9], could represent an ethical dilemma [18], or may have negative impact on students and academic staff [11,31]. There is even empirical evidence that suggests that a higher customer orientation may result in lower student academic performance [61] and threaten the quality of education by forming unrealistic expectations and stimulating narcissistic characteristics in students [62].…”

“…Service quality literature states that providing higher quality is an essential strategy for business to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. However, it is important to acknowledge the complexity of the university, understanding that to measure quality requires more than simple indicators [31]. In this sense, Redding [49] highlights that service quality cannot be compared to customer satisfaction, especially in HE, because customer satisfaction is related to short-term perceptions from consumption experiences, and this is not the objective of HE.…”

“…Lusch and Wu [28] (p. 10) argue that since education is a co-created learning service, SDL can provide a framework for both HE strategy and public policy. In this regard, recently, some efforts have been made to propose SDL as a framework to address value co-creation in HE contexts (e.g., [2,[28][29][30][31][32]). However, the literature is still insufficient, and the students-as-customer metaphor has not been discussed thoroughly within a theoretical framework based on SDL to provide a clear analytical understanding of the issue.…”

Qualitative Life-Grids: A Proposed Method for Comparative European Educational Research

“…Biographical data was also needed to interrogate some of the assumptions underpinning previous research into the role that class, gender and ethnicity plays in disadvantaging students in university contexts (Archer et al, 2003;Forsyth & Furlong, 2003;Crozier et al, 2008;Reay et al, 2009a, b;David, 2009;Pasztor, 2010). This literature, which is concerned with decreasing inequality, sometimes reinforces unjust university hierarchies by accepting league table representations of quality as true.…”