Capturing and prioritizing students’ requirements for course design by embedding Fuzzy-AHP and linear programming in QFD

Customer requirements play a vital and important role in the design of products and services. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a popular, widely used method that helps translate customer requirements into design specifications. Thus, the foundation for a successful QFD implementation lies in the accurate capturing and prioritization of these requirements. This paper proposes and tests the use of an alternative framework for prioritizing students’ requirements within QFD. More specifically, Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy-AHP) and the linear programming method (LP-GW-AHP) based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are embedded into QFD (QFD-LP-GW-Fuzzy AHP) in order to account for inherent subjectivity of human judgements. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is assessed in capturing and prioritizing students’ requirements regarding courses’ learning outcomes within the process of an academic course design. Sensitivity analysis evaluates the robustness of the prioritization solution and implications for course design specifications are discussed.