Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) better known in industry as Total Quality Management (TQM), is a management philosophy which has transformed many businesses and corporations internally and is now beginning to make strong inroads into universities, predominantly on the administrative side. This paper raises the question of whether the conceptual framework provided by CQI/TQM is a fertile one for addressing the problems involved in university teaching. It translates basic tenets of CQI/TQM into the univeristy teaching context and outlines how these ideas have been implemented in a large, multisection, introductory statistics course. Particular attention is given to the problems of fostering steady year-to-year improvements in a course that can survive changes of personnel, and in making improvements by stimulating group creativity and then capturing the results for the future.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education