It is almost the end of the first mini at CMU and most of us are grateful that we are going to have a couple of days off.  Turning back for a minute I asked myself… Did I get the educational service I paid for?  Were my courses worthwhile?  Where can I compare if I got what I was supposed to get and if not how do I demand a refund/compensation?  In short, where are the courses’ SLAs?  (read more..)

Think about it for a second, take any given course and ask yourself the above questions.  Many will be tempted to answer: well, I did get what I was supposed to get because we covered the syllabus, but… what about the quality of the service? One can cover the syllabus by letting students read a textbook and that is it; also, there are many courses in which the syllabus is kind of inexistent, they are just meant to be “discussions” about a given topic.

Besides, there are so many components that integrate an educational service: the teacher, the TA’s, the curriculum, the facilities, the learning material, etc.   We didn’t intend to pay for any specific of those items, we paid for the whole package… in my case, I paid for a master (the degree) and the knowledge it supposed to accompany it; but… where is the SLA that will serve me to compare and, in a necessary case, enforce that I’m getting the service levels that I’m supposed to get… in fact what are those levels in the first place?.

I’m sure there must be some kind of guidelines that specify, for example, that a teacher should spend at least N number of hours in activities related to his/her class and the same for the TA’s but those are just a small portion of the educational service as a whole.

When I discussed the above thoughts with a colleague he told me.. “well, that is what the faculty evaluations are for”. And yes, I agree, they certainly serve to improve the quality of the service but they do not answer my question… where are the SLAs that would allow me to compare if I got what I was supposed to get?  I have taken courses in which I have felt very disappointed (and stated that on the evaluation) and yet I haven’t seen a refund (or some other kind of compensation) in my tuition; how do I argue that I didn’t get the service level I was supposed to get?

I guess the answer to the above is that the Educational sector, as well as several other service sectors, is still in the struggle to transform into a more industrialized kind of service in which one could measure a bit more precise the offerings and the actual results that the service is providing; so there are no clear SLAs for the moment.

It would be very interesting to hear the audience’s comments on the matter :)

Score: 9.3, Votes: 3