A novel methodology for engineering course design based on Six sigma principles: Incorporation of diverse constituents in course design

This paper seeks to present a systematic and thorough methodology to incorporate basic six sigma principles for quality into engineering course design from the ground up. Six sigma principles have been widely used in industry in conjunction with the basic philosophy of 'lean thinking' so as to achieve the twin goals of quality enhancement and cost minimization. The authors intend to extend an identical thought process to the field of education, beginning at the basic course level in an engineering setting. The principal advantage of this extension is to incorporate voices of widely varying stakeholders including the community, industry, academicians etc into the basic course structure. Another advantage of implementing this thought process includes rigorous control of instruction quality across a wide spectrum of instructors thereby infusing much needed objectivity into basic course design. Different Six Sigma tools such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Pareto Analysis etc have been used as appropriate and a pilot study is presented at the end in order to illustrate practical utility of the methodology.