About Higher Education TechQual+
The Higher Education TechQual+ assessment has its origins in a pilot assessment
conducted at Texas A&M University at Qatar
in the Spring of 2006. Under the leadership of
Dr. Timothy M. Chester, the
management team of Information Technology Services(ITS) worked to
build an instrument to gather feedback from the TAMUQ community of end
users in a way that would provide objective criteria for service and project planning.
They modeled their work on the existing SERVQUAL, and IS SERVQUAL approaches, but
paid particular attention to pioneering work by the leadership of
Texas A&M University Libraries and their partners from the Association
of Research Libraries, who had previously developed the LibQual+
conceptual model and assessment instrument. The LibQual+ conceptual model itself was also based
in part on SERVQUAL, a tool used in the private sector to assess the quality of services.
Following the success of the pilot project, a research project was commissioned by
Dr. Timothy Chester. The goal of the project is to develop a scientifically reliable and valid instrument
that can be adopted by all institutions of higher education to conduct assessments
of technology services on their own campuses. The resulting instrument will
be delivered through this web portal, shielding the participating institutions from
the rigors and complexities of survey research.
TechQual+ is a three year project, and will consist
of multiple rounds of qualitative and quantitative data collection from
participating institutions beginning in the fall of 2006. Using this data, the TechQual+
instrument will be continually refined until the resulting instrument is considered
to be scientifically reliable, valid, and universal. The goal of the project
is to understand what end users feel that "technology services" really are and then
to develop an instrument that allows for the systematic exploration of the quality
of these services in a way that can be benchmarked and provides for comparisons across
institutions. Funding for the project is provided by Pepperdine University.
Additional information regarding the project, including
the formal research design, institutional review board (IRB) documents, transcripts
of project meetings, and power-point slides are available inside the password protected
area of this website. To access these materials you must register, following
the 'Signup'
link at the top of this page. Presentations regarding website functionality
and other documentation are available here.
The TechQual+ project team is grateful for the exceptional work by the staff of the Texas A&M University Libraries
as they developed and implemented the LibQual+ process. The success
of the TechQual+ project will be due in large part to their pioneering research
that produced the LibQual+ instrument.