Activities at Delaware County Community College (Pennsylvania) in implementing Total Quality Management are examined and compared with criteria used by the United States Chamber of Commerce for making quality awards to businesses. Assessed areas include management leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, employee development, teamwork,…

Hoshin, or breakthrough, planning is the Total Quality Management method of integrating strategic planning into the daily work of organizational units. Delaware County (Pennsylvania) Community College's adaptation of the process and its use in daily management are described and presented in the form of a flow chart. (MSE)

The University of Kansas experience in applying Total Quality Management methods illustrates how use of flow charts can reduce substantially the time spent on a complex data-collection and reporting process. Although flow chart construction can be time-consuming, it is a systematic way to uncover sensible solutions with significant payoffs. (MSE)

It is argued that, despite the special character of higher education and its institutions, the principles of the Total Quality Management approach (continuous improvement, consistent quality, staff/student participation, meeting customer needs, coordination, management procedures that detect poor quality and encourage good quality) can contribute…

The evolution of a Total Quality Management approach at Aston University (England) is chronicled, especially as it relates to changes in British higher education and the university in the 1980s. Focus is on the organizational context of the institution, steps taken to become informed about quality management, and refinement of objectives. (MSE)

Analyzes nature and effects of public-management evaluation concepts on institutions of higher education, using as an example Tennessee's policy of monitoring performance of its institutions by linking performance indicators to public funding. Concludes that while policy has been successful overall, allowing a "firewall" between…

Web-based learning environments are a great asset only if they are designed well and used as intended. The urgency to create courses in response to the growing demand for online learning has resulted in a hurried push to drop PowerPoint notes into Web-based course management systems (WBCMSs), devise an electronic quiz, put together a few…

Objective: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education have mandated the transition from written global evaluation methods to competency-based assessments in resident and medical student training. Assessment of competency requires analysis of performance data from numerous sources. This…

As public and academic librarians rely more heavily on electronic resources to satisfy patrons' information needs, seamless searching across print and electronic holdings gets more and more essential. Enter the integrated library system (ILS)-independent electronic resource management system (ERMS), which promises to integrate, search, and expose…

When budgets are tight, administrators have to find ways to provide and maintain facilities without draining their budgets. Fortunately, advancements in technology, new ideas in construction and design, and savvy management strategies are available that enable schools and universities to spend their money more wisely and efficiently. Here are 10…

This briefing serves as a companion piece to sessions held at the 2009 Governors Education Symposium. It is divided into four issue briefs: (1) Standards and Assessments by Ilene Berman, National Governors Association Center for Best Practices; (2) Teacher Effectiveness by Sandi Jacobs, National Council on Teacher Quality; (3) Supporting…

A real-time interactive distance lecture is a joint work that should be accomplished by the effort of the lecturer and his students in remote sites. It is important for the lecturer to get understanding information from the students which cannot be efficiently collected by only using video/audio channels between the lecturer and the students. This…

In 2003, a portfolio system was implemented to manage the data associated with the field experiences in a teacher education program at a research institution in the southeast region of the United States. In this longitudinal study, the implementation trends from usage data extracted from the system are used to discuss the implications for the use…

Merrill proposes First Principles of Instruction, including a problem- or task-centered strategy for designing instruction. However, when the tasks or problems are ill-defined or complex, task-centered instruction can be difficult to design. We describe an online task-centered training at a land-grant university designed to train employees to use…

This paper examines the question of decomposability versus complexity of teaching situations by presenting three case studies of MIS courses. Because all three courses were highly successful in their observed outcomes, the paper hypothesizes that if the attributes of effective course design are decomposable, one would expect to see a large number…